The graveyard holds the remains of a parish church dedicated to St. Nicholas in its south-western quadrant, while the ruins of a separate medieval chapel occupy the centre of the same ground. The two structures are distinct monuments, not one building in various states of collapse, and that detail alone sets this place apart from the typical country churchyard.

The graveyard itself is a rectangular plot, roughly 71 metres north to south and 88 metres east to west, enclosed by a stone boundary wall built after 1700, with an entrance gate on the northern side. The medieval fabric inside that wall is considerably older than the enclosure. The parish church of St. Nicholas is recorded under its own monument reference, as is the chapel, suggesting they have distinct architectural histories even if they now share the same ground. The site does not exist in isolation either. Adare Castle sits approximately 75 metres to the south-south-west, and the Franciscan Abbey lies around 290 metres to the south-east, meaning this graveyard forms part of a dense concentration of medieval ecclesiastical and defensive monuments in a relatively small area of County Limerick. The information was compiled by Caimin O'Brien and uploaded to the record in July 2019.

The entrance gate on the northern side is the natural point of approach. Once inside, it is worth taking time to distinguish the two separate ruined structures rather than treating them as a single undifferentiated pile of stonework. The chapel ruins in the centre of the enclosure and the church remains in the south-western corner each occupy their own space. Given the proximity of the castle and the abbey, visitors with an interest in medieval Adare will find it more rewarding to treat this graveyard as one stop in a short circuit rather than a destination in isolation, since the monuments are close enough to one another to be visited on foot in a single afternoon.