The pointed arch, cut from well-dressed stone with chamfers on both faces, rises to just over two metres and opens through a rectangular stone structure wider than the doorway itself. A short distance away at the south-eastern corner, a second, smaller entrance tells a different story: flat-headed and lintelled, with straight ingoings and a drawbar socket cut into the north side, it is the kind of door built to be locked. Between them, these two entrances enclose a roughly trapezoidal enclosure, about 67 metres east to west, wrapped entirely in a rubble wall standing up to nearly two metres in places. At the base of the eastern wall, from outside, some unusually large foundation stones are visible, suggesting the boundary here has deep roots.

The graveyard surrounds both Kilfenora's Church of Ireland church and the older cathedral, a Romanesque and later medieval structure that was once the seat of a small diocese. As Rogers noted in 2002, the ground here is small and tightly packed with burials, and has been in continuous use for at least nine hundred years, possibly longer. That kind of density accumulates quietly, the soil barely distinguishing one century from the next. Among the things that did not remain in place are the high crosses, several of which once stood within the enclosure. Around 2005 they were moved indoors to the cathedral's Lady Chapel, where the shelter from the elements offers better long-term protection for the carved stonework.