The ground at Ardnageehy has been receiving the dead for centuries, yet the evidence left above the surface is remarkably sparse, a rough rectangle of roughly forty metres by fifty metres on the western side of the road, where the majority of those interred have left no legible trace at all.

The site sits alongside the fragmentary ruins of the old parish church of Ardnageehy, what remains of it lying just to the north-west of the graveyard's centre. This is a pattern common across rural Ireland, where a medieval or early modern parish church fell out of use or into ruin, often following the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the ground around it continued to be treated as consecrated and worthy of burial. The few markers that do survive at Ardnageehy push back only as far as the 1770s, which does not mean the ground was not in use before then; plain uninscribed stones, wooden markers long since rotted away, or simple earthen mounds would have served many families who could not afford, or did not seek, a carved inscription. That the site remains in occasional use today gives it an unusual continuity, a thread still running from the eighteenth century or earlier into the present, even as most of its history has been absorbed silently into the soil.