Among the cultivated fields of County Kildare, a low knoll rises just enough to set one rectangular enclosure apart from the surrounding tillage. The burying ground at Nicholastown occupies a large walled area, roughly seventy metres along its east-west axis and forty metres across, enclosed by a stone wall standing about one and a half metres high. What catches the eye is the slight asymmetry of the whole: the eastern end of the enclosure was extended at some point in modern times, giving the plot a quietly lopsided quality, as though the living kept quietly negotiating more room from the landscape.

The graveyard remains in active use, and legible grave markers run from the nineteenth century to the present day, placing the site in that category of places where the very recent and the considerably old sit side by side without ceremony. To the north-west of the enclosure's centre stands a ruined church, the kind of roofless shell that appears throughout the Irish countryside and which typically predates the surrounding burial ground by several centuries, the community of the dead having gathered around an already-ancient structure. The church ruin and the burying ground together suggest a long continuity of use on this particular rise in the land, the knoll perhaps chosen originally for the practical reason that it stood clear of the wetter ground around it.