It sits there with little ceremony, incorporated into the fabric of a ruin that has itself been overtaken by the community that continued to bury its dead around it for centuries. That combination, a medieval carved figure sharing space with graves from the 1780s and walled family plots still in use today, gives this quiet corner of north Cork an archaeological texture that is easy to walk past without fully registering.

The graveyard is irregularly shaped, roughly ninety metres north to south and seventy metres east to west, enclosed to the south by a tree-lined earthen bank and elsewhere by a low stone wall. A short avenue of trees leads in from the road to the west. At its centre stand the remains of the parish church of Ballyhay, and it is here that the layers of time accumulate most noticeably. The local historian Grove White, writing between 1905 and 1925, recorded a monument within the chancel dated 1761. The earliest grave markers found elsewhere in the graveyard go back to the 1780s and 1790s, and a number of railed and walled burial enclosures, including a cluster running along the line of the church's north chancel wall, suggest that certain families treated this ground as something to be defined and held across generations. The fourteenth-century effigy, fixed to the east wall, predates all of this by several hundred years, a remnant of a much earlier devotional and commemorative world that the later graveyard simply grew up around.