The oldest portion of the burial ground, the rectangular plot recorded on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, now sits at the centre of a much larger graveyard, ringed by successive enlargements that pushed outward to the east, north-west, south, and west across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That original rectangle has effectively become a core sample of the site's history, and it is here, in the middle of the modern graveyard, that the earliest surviving gravestones are found, most of them dating to the nineteenth century.

The burial ground sits on the north-western side of a road with Bantry Bay opening out to the north, and its long use almost certainly owes something to the presence of a Franciscan friary immediately to its north-west. The Franciscans, a mendicant order who arrived in Ireland during the thirteenth century, typically established their houses close to towns and roads, and communities continued to bury near their ruins long after the friaries themselves fell into disuse following the sixteenth-century dissolutions. The friary here is recorded separately as a distinct site, but the two are clearly bound together, the burial ground having grown steadily outward from whatever modest plot first served the friary's community and its neighbours.