A stone-lined avenue leads from the main street to the northern gate, following the exact course of a lane that was already old when it appeared on the first Ordnance Survey map in 1839. On either side of the lane's entrance, that early map shows a row of houses, long since gone by the time of the 1900 revision. The lane survived; the buildings did not.

The graveyard sits set back from the south side of Main Street, a rectangular enclosure roughly 110 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, bounded by a stone wall and tied historically to the medieval parish church of St Mary. Its documented life stretches back at least to around 1550, when a rental account of Gowran recorded in the Calendar of Ormond Deeds refers to 'the churchyard gate', a casual mention that implies the gate and the enclosed ground around it were already unremarkable features of the town's fabric. A medieval college, meaning a community house established to support a small group of clergy, was positioned in the south-eastern angle of the graveyard, built to accommodate four priests or chaplains. White's map of Gowran, drawn in 1710 or 1711, already shows the lane connecting the street to the burial ground, suggesting the approach route had been fixed in the townscape for generations before any of the surviving cartographic record begins.