It is circular, a form that often points to origins far older than the headstones now standing in it, since early medieval ecclesiastical enclosures in Ireland were commonly laid out in this way, the boundary itself carrying as much significance as whatever stood within. St Mary's Church occupies higher ground to the north, looking down over the burial ground in the manner of a site that has been arranged with some deliberateness across the centuries.

The layering here becomes clearer once you know that excavation took place ahead of building works. When a new parish centre was planned to extend northward from St Mary's, the site was subject to archaeological investigation under licence number 04E0033. Thirty of the thirty-two burials uncovered were fully excavated; two were left in place beneath the boundary wall of a crypt that records show was built in 1802. The majority of the burials dated from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, according to the analysis carried out by Keith in 2004, though their presence so close to the crypt wall suggests the site had been accumulating its dead across overlapping periods. Behind the church, the White mausoleum adds another layer to the story, a private family structure of the kind that prosperous households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sometimes commissioned to set themselves apart, literally and architecturally, from the general burial ground.

The graveyard remains in active use, so visitors should be mindful that this is a working parish site rather than a purely historical one. The parish centre now occupies the space between the church and the mausoleum, which makes the spatial relationship between those two older structures less immediately obvious than it might once have been. The circular form of the graveyard itself is perhaps the most striking thing to notice on arrival, best appreciated from the slightly elevated ground around the church where the full curve of the enclosure becomes legible. Clonsilla village is accessible from the N3 and is served by a suburban rail station, making the site straightforward to reach from the city.