There is no wall, no gate, no inscribed headstone. The site's boundaries are defined only by the stones themselves, arranged across a roughly subcircular area measuring about twelve metres north to south and sixteen metres east to west. What looks, at first glance, like a natural accumulation of field stone is, in all likelihood, a field of grave markers, the modest and enduring language of a community burying its dead without ceremony or monument.

The site was already old enough to be labelled simply 'Old Burial Ground' when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch map in 1842, which suggests it had long since passed out of active use by that point. Burial grounds of this kind, sometimes called cillíní or killeens when associated with the interment of unbaptised infants or marginalised individuals, though the specific use of this one is not recorded, were a common feature of the Irish rural landscape. They occupied liminal ground, often outside the bounds of a parish churchyard, and their markers were characteristically uncut and uninscribed, indistinguishable to an untrained eye from the ordinary stones of the hillside. At Canrooska, that quality of near-invisibility is precisely what makes the place worth attention.