It is the kind of arrangement that makes a village square feel subtly different from others, the dead occupying prime civic real estate alongside the living.

The graveyard is roughly rectangular, measuring approximately 45 metres east to west and 55 metres north to south. On its western side sits the Church of Ireland parish church of Kilworth, so that church and burial ground form a single composed ensemble. The headstones here reach back to the early eighteenth century, placing the earliest legible burials in the decades after 1700. Alongside the upright headstones are chest tombs, large box-shaped above-ground monuments that were a favoured form for families of some means in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and burial vaults, which are essentially small underground or semi-underground chambers constructed for the interment of particular families. Together these different monument types reflect several generations of local society, from modest markers to the more elaborate commemorations of those who could afford permanent, enclosed structures.