Originally laid out on the shoreline with no enclosing wall, the site grew up around the ruins of a medieval parish church, and the oldest memorials still cluster close to those remains, as though reluctant to stray too far from the original purpose of the place. The fact that burials continued here across several centuries, and that the ground remains in active use today, gives the site a continuity that sits a little awkwardly with its coastal, almost liminal setting.

The medieval church at the core of the graveyard is recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record as DU015-021001. The graveyard itself began without formal boundaries, open to the strand around it, which was not unusual for early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland where the separation between sacred ground and the surrounding landscape was understood rather than enforced. Over time, a roughly square raised area was defined by a masonry wall, and the site has since been considerably extended to the north, now covering three acres in total. That northern expansion is bounded by a limestone rubble wall, a common enough building material in the Dublin coastal area, and the contrast between the older enclosed core and the newer ground beyond it is still legible if you look for it. Memorials on the site span the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

The graveyard is accessed from Sutton Strand, which places it in a setting that most visitors to the area associate with walking and sea air rather than burial history. The raised ground of the older section is noticeable even from a distance, the masonry wall marking it out from the surrounding landscape. The oldest stones are concentrated around the church ruins, and these are worth seeking out, though weathering means some inscriptions require patience. Because the site is still in active use, it functions as a working graveyard as much as a historical one, and visitors should bear that in mind.