The graveyard at Kilcasheen measures roughly 23 metres by 17 metres, its boundary marked at the south-west by a field and townland edge and undefined elsewhere, as though the land simply absorbed it over time. Inside, the graves are marked mostly by plain, low stones, none rising higher than 30 centimetres, laid out in a broadly north-south alignment. Two undated rectangular slabs occupy the north-east end. Beneath and around them lie what appear to be the foundations of a church, suggesting that this was once a more formally organised sacred site before it became something harder to categorise.

The scholar and folklorist Eugene O'Curry, writing in the Ordnance Survey Letters in the nineteenth century, recorded that the graveyard had already been abandoned as an active burial place by 1739. What gave it a second life was catastrophe. O'Curry noted that his own grandfather had buried people here who died in the years of famine that followed, a detail that anchors an otherwise undated landscape to a specific and painful moment in local memory. The site also served as a cillín, a children's burial ground, one of the informal plots used across Ireland for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground by Church convention. That dual function, famine burial place and cillín, layered onto an already older, abandoned churchyard, gives Kilcasheen an unusual density of grief for so small an area of ground. Burials continued here into the twentieth century, long after the site had ceased to appear in any official record of active use.