But the most extraordinary thing about this place has long since left it. Somewhere among the graves, which include fine 18th- and 19th-century headstones as well as a row of low, uninscribed markers along the northern side, a parish priest once kept a bronze reliquary hand, used by local people for swearing solemn oaths. That object was eventually removed by one of the titular bishops of Cloyne, and the graveyard has been quietly unremarkable ever since.

The reliquary in question is now identified as the 12th-century shrine of St Lachtain's arm, an object of considerable importance in early Irish ecclesiastical metalwork, presently held by the National Museum of Ireland. St Lachtain, also known as Lachteen, was a 7th-century abbot associated with Donoghmore, which takes its name from the Irish for the great church of the saint, so the presence of his arm-shrine here was not arbitrary. The account of the brazen hand and its oath-swearing function comes from Charles Smith's 1750 history of Cork, which describes the practice in the matter-of-fact tone of someone recording a custom still within living memory at the time of writing. The graveyard itself sits within a roughly rectangular enclosure of approximately 55 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, and near the church ruins there is a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind often associated with early medieval ecclesiastical or settlement sites in Ireland. The earliest legible date on the headstones is 1777, though the site's origins are considerably older.