That detail is easy to pass over, but it quietly signals something about the pressures of eighteenth-century Catholic life in Ireland, when public markers of clerical identity were not always safe or straightforward. That these stones exist at all, lettered in Latin and still legible in a graveyard that remains in active use, gives Ballynoe a particular kind of gravity.

The site itself is roughly rectangular, running about a hundred metres east to west and fifty metres north to south, enclosed on the western side by a stone wall and elsewhere by a stone-faced earthen bank. The ruins of Ballynoe parish church occupy the north-east corner. Among the 18th and 19th century headstones are chest tombs and two mausoleums; the larger of the two has a hipped roof, now collapsing, and carries a plaque dated 1801. Writers including Charles Smith in 1750 and Samuel Lewis in 1863 noted what they believed were the remains of a religious house somewhere on the site, though scholars have since treated that claim with considerable scepticism, and no firm evidence for such a building has been established.

The graveyard is in Ballynoe village and, as a site still in use for burials, is accessible in the ordinary way. The Latin-inscribed priest stones are worth seeking out specifically; their survival in reasonable condition, and the fact that they record names and dates during a period when Catholic clergy occupied an ambiguous legal position in Ireland, makes them more than incidental curiosities among the wider collection of monuments here.