When the Cork to Dublin line was laid through this part of mid-Cork, it cut directly across an enclosure that had long served as a place of the dead, dividing the site on a north-west to south-east axis and leaving only a portion of the original ground intact.

The enclosure is recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a D-shaped area roughly sixty metres north to south and fifty metres east to west, defined on its curved side by a field fence and open along its straight western edge. That distinctive shape, common to early burial grounds in Ireland, suggests the site predates the cartographic record by some considerable margin. When the railway was constructed, the fence line was broken, and what remained on the north-eastern side of the tracks became the portion still known locally as the burial ground. The arc of fencing to the north and east is all that survives of the enclosure's original boundary.