What makes the enclosure quietly peculiar is its shape: the graveyard is triangular, defined by masonry walls, with the only entrance at the narrow apex to the southwest. To reach the parish church at its centre, you enter at the pointed end and the space opens around you, the walls spreading outward to the northeast where the ground begins to fall toward the river.

The church within the enclosure is the parish church of Jamestown, and the graveyard measures roughly eighty metres along its northeast to southwest axis and about seventy metres across at its widest northeastern extent. The headstones are largely nineteenth century in date, which is not unusual for rural Irish graveyards of this type, where earlier markers in timber or uncut stone have long since disappeared. Jamestown itself was a plantation-era town, established in the early seventeenth century and once fortified, with the north gate that still gives this part of the town its character. Archaeological testing carried out about sixty metres to the west of the graveyard, as part of an investigation recorded in 1998, produced no material related to the burial ground, leaving the earlier history of this particular plot somewhat open.