The ground measures roughly 28 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west, a tightly bounded plot whose eighteenth-century origins place it firmly in the era when this stretch of the south Dublin coastline was being slowly ordered and formalised by civic authority.

The chapel to which the graveyard is attached, dedicated to St Matthew, was built by Dublin Corporation between 1704 and 1706. The title "Royal Chapel" reflects the ecclesiastical and civic ambitions of the period, when Corporation-sponsored church building was part of a broader effort to establish Protestant parish infrastructure in and around the city. The tower came slightly later, completed in 1713 to a design by Richard Mills, as recorded by Maurice Craig in his 1969 survey of Dublin architecture. Mills is not a name that features prominently in popular architectural histories, which makes the tower a quietly interesting footnote in the story of early eighteenth-century Dublin building.

The church and its burial ground sit on Irishtown Road, between Ringsend and Sandymount, an area that has shifted considerably in character over the centuries from a working coastal settlement to a residential neighbourhood bordered by the South Bull and Sandymount Strand. The graveyard is visible from the road, and the church building itself, though no longer in use as an active place of worship in its original form, retains the tower Mills designed. Anyone approaching on foot from the Ringsend direction will find the site opens up gradually as the road curves, the tower acting as a useful landmark. The compact dimensions of the burial ground mean that the whole space can be taken in from a single vantage point, which makes it easier to appreciate the relationship between the graveyard's layout and the southern elevation of the chapel it was designed to accompany.