Alongside 570 named headstones, many cut from the local Valentia slate that was quarried extensively on the island during the nineteenth century, the site holds twenty sandstone tombs clustered around the ruins of a medieval church. Sixteen of those tombs carry no identifying name at all. According to one account, some of the Knights of Kerry, whose seat was at Glanleam on the island, are buried here, though no tomb confirming this has been identified.

The church at the heart of the old burial ground was known as 'Darnery', and it appears in the Papal Taxation Lists of 1302 to 1306 for the diocese of Ardfert, indicating it was a functioning parish church at that point. By 1622 it had dropped out of the diocesan record entirely, suggesting it may already have fallen into disuse, though a reference in the Book of Survey and Distribution, compiled around 1650 to 1660, implies it was still serving some function at that date. By the mid-eighteenth century it was in ruins. What surrounds those ruins now is a layered accumulation of burial practice across many centuries. Fourteen notched grave markers, simple unhewn slabs of local slate and sandstone with a shallow notch cut into the top, represent one of the most basic forms of medieval cross-marker known in Irish graveyards. The notch is a minimal gesture toward the cross form, and similar markers have been found at graveyards across Kerry and as far away as St Colman's on Inishbofin. Five small slate slabs with hour-glass perforations were also recorded near the church ruin. Perforated stones are generally associated with early ecclesiastical sites, though their precise function is not well understood; the examples here are notably different in form from the tall perforated pillar-stones found at early Christian sites on the Dingle Peninsula such as Reask and Kilmalkedar. A small sandstone at the western edge of the burial ground carries inscribed marks that resist easy interpretation, among them shapes resembling inverted broad arrows, a possible stylised Chi-Rho, the early Christian monogram combining the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek, and what appears to be a serif letter T.

The old burial ground sits on steeply sloping ground and is genuinely difficult to walk through. The terrain is uneven, the grass grows thickly over the low markers, and the density of burial increases noticeably as the slope rises toward the ruined church. The entrance is through twin gates set between rounded piers at the lower northern boundary, and an old step-stile in the southern wall, now disused, is a quiet reminder that the site was once accessed from a different direction altogether.