It is an quietly anomalous arrangement: a raised, roughly square plot bounded by a low wall, holding the remains of a medieval church within its edges, while golfers move past on all sides.

The site off Strand Road has roots that reach back to the medieval period, the ruined church within its boundary recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record as DU015-007001. The graveyard continued in use long after the church fell into disrepair, accumulating grave markers and memorials spanning the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Among the families commemorated here are the Jamesons, the Dublin distilling dynasty whose name became one of the most recognised in Irish whiskey. For many years the site was heavily overgrown, its older memorials increasingly obscured, until a clearance programme in 2010 opened it up again. That renewed access prompted a practical response from many families with plots here: in the years following, a number of graves were formalised with kerbed surrounds and gravel dressing, giving parts of the graveyard a more tended appearance that sits alongside much older, weathered stones.

The graveyard is reached off Strand Road in Portmarnock, though visitors should be aware that the surrounding golf course shapes the approach in a way that can feel a little disorienting. The raised ground on which the plot sits is worth noting: elevation of this kind in a graveyard often indicates continuous use over a long period, as successive burials and the gradual accumulation of soil lift the ground above the surrounding landscape. The older grave markers, some dating to the 1700s, reward close reading, and the remnant church fabric within the enclosure gives a sense of the longer history the site carries beneath its more recent tidying.