The town's working graveyard has spread across what was once the cloister of a medieval friary, and continues inside the friary's roofless ruin itself. Headstones rise between old stone walls, graves occupy spaces that were once covered walkways and garden courtyards, and the boundary between the sacred uses of different centuries has long since dissolved into a single, continuous place of burial.

The friary whose remains anchor the south-east corner of the site dates to the medieval period, and the ruined structure has effectively become a container for the graveyard that grew up around and within it. St Mary's Catholic Church, which occupies the north-west corner of the roughly rectangular enclosure, incorporates an earlier tower, suggesting that the site has been in continuous religious use across several centuries and several phases of building. The graveyard itself measures approximately sixty metres north to south and eighty metres east to west. A significant number of mid-eighteenth century headstones survive here, giving the site particular value for anyone interested in the funerary art and lettering of that period. The memorial inscriptions and gravemarkers located inside the friary itself were catalogued in the early twentieth century by Fitzgerald, providing a record of what the stones said before weathering took its toll.

The site sits on the western bank of the Awbeg River, the same modest north Cork waterway that Edmund Spenser once wrote about under the name Mulla. For a visitor, the layering is worth attending to slowly: the friary walls, the post-Reformation church tower embedded in later masonry, and the gravestones pressing right up against medieval stonework, with some slabs positioned where monks once walked between the cloister and the choir.