Most people driving past would notice only the pointed arched gateway and a walled plot of modest size. What they would not easily guess is that somewhere inside, a seventeenth-century charnel-house, a structure built to store exhumed bones when burial space ran short, was constructed around the standing west gable of a medieval church, effectively folding one building into another. The two structures now read as one, the older masonry absorbed into the newer, and the effect is less dramatic than it sounds, which is rather the point. This is a place that does not announce itself.

The site's earliest association is with St. Mochonna, a sixth-century figure linked to the early monastery of Holmpatrick in Skerries, on the north Dublin coast. According to Francis Elrington Ball's 1902 account of the county's history, this graveyard occupies the location of a religious site connected to that same tradition. The medieval church whose gable survives was already a ruin by the time the charnel-house was built around it in the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the enclosure had settled into its current role as a burial ground, filled with the memorials from those two centuries that visitors can still read today. The charnel-house and its incorporated gable are recorded in the archaeological inventory compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, with Turner's 1983 study providing the detailed analysis of those conjoined structures.

The graveyard is accessed from Carrickbrennan Road, north of Monkstown Castlefarm, through the pointed arch gateway that marks its entrance. The enclosure measures roughly 60 metres north to south and just under 69 metres east to west, which makes it a reasonable size without feeling expansive. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century memorials are spread across the interior, and the charnel-house incorporating the medieval gable sits within the site. Given the urban setting, the approach involves ordinary footpaths and suburban traffic rather than any rural lane. The interest here is almost entirely archaeological and historical rather than scenic, and visitors who come expecting a conventionally atmospheric old churchyard may find the surroundings surprisingly mundane. Those who come knowing what to look for in the fabric of the walls will find considerably more.