The friary, known locally as North Abbey, gives the site its particular quality: the living continue to bury their dead amid the remnants of medieval religious life, the two histories occupying the same ground without much ceremony about it.

The oldest gravestone recorded in the yard carries a date of 1550, noted by the antiquarian Hayman in 1855, though the bulk of surviving inscribed headstones date from 1732 onwards, a concentration of eighteenth and nineteenth century memorial carving that reflects the period when such markers became more common across Irish burial grounds. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 recorded a rectangular yard of modest dimensions, roughly eight metres across and sixty metres long on its longer axis, oriented northeast to southwest. Since then a substantial extension has been added to the northwest, expanding the ground considerably beyond its historic footprint. In the late 1980s, a FÁS employment scheme, the state training and employment authority of the time, carried out a systematic recording of the inscriptions here, capturing the texts of stones that weathering might eventually make illegible.