That administrative invisibility sits oddly with the physical reality: a roughly rectangular plot, approximately 64 metres east to west and 32 metres north to south, bounded to the west by the River Rine and still receiving burials today.

The southern wall of the graveyard, a roughly coursed stone construction standing under a metre high, follows a curve that traces the line of an earlier castle moat, so the dead are, in a sense, interred within the ghost of a medieval defensive feature. A small gateway in that wall incorporates reused cut stone, the kind of quiet recycling of earlier worked stone that was common practice across centuries of Irish building. To the north-west, the graveyard wall meets what may be a 17th-century guesthouse associated with the Franciscan friary complex of Quin Abbey itself. When groundworks were carried out in 2000 ahead of the installation of floodlighting at the abbey, archaeological monitoring under licence revealed disturbed human bone at a distance of one to two metres beyond the southern wall, suggesting the graveyard's boundaries were, at some point, rather more generous than they now appear.