A graveyard that uses a medieval chapel as its boundary walls is unusual enough, but what makes the burial ground at Greatconnell quietly arresting is how completely the dead of one era have settled inside the architecture of another. The post-1700 graveyard occupies the eastern end of the Lady Chapel of a thirteenth-century Augustinian abbey, the kind of enclosed religious house whose canons followed the Rule of St Augustine. The east gable of that chapel forms the graveyard's eastern boundary, while the abbey's north and south walls serve as the north and south limits of the burial ground. The ground inside sits noticeably higher than the surrounding terrain, the accumulated result of centuries of burial and soil disturbance.

What is particularly telling is a drawing made in 1781, held in the National Library of Ireland, which shows the east gable of the Lady Chapel still standing but the area around it not yet in use as a graveyard. Sometime after that date, local people began burying their dead within the roofless shell of the chapel, enclosing the space with a new west wall and a round-headed gateway that remains the principal entrance today. That west wall appears to be the only section of boundary wall built specifically for the graveyard's post-1700 function; everything else belongs to the thirteenth-century fabric. The south wall rewards closer inspection: on its north face, traces of vaulted arcading survive from the original abbey, a reminder that the structure once had considerably more architectural ambition than its present ruined state suggests. The burial ground itself is modest in scale, roughly 27 metres east to west and 17 metres north to south, and contains table tombs, grave slabs, and headstones dating from the eighteenth century onwards.