There is no buffer of landscaping or long approach; the boundary between the living town and its dead is simply a wall and a latch. This is the case at the Church of Ireland graveyard in Ballymahon, Co. Longford, where the south-western edge of the burial ground meets the street head-on, and the gate sits at the centre of that wall as though it were any ordinary entrance.

The graveyard occupies an irregular plot, roughly 58 metres from east-north-east to west-south-west and 32 metres from north-north-west to south-south-east, enclosed by a stone wall. It is associated with an 18th-century Church of Ireland church that sits within its western half. Church of Ireland parishes in Irish towns often retained their burial grounds long after congregations shrank or buildings fell out of use, and this is a characteristic pattern across the midlands. The memorial inscriptions that can still be read on the stones here date from the 19th and 20th centuries, meaning the visible funerary record belongs to a period of considerable change in Irish life, from the post-Famine decades through to the mid-20th century, even if the ground itself and the church at its centre are older.