It suggests an older landscape beneath, one that the road was built around rather than through, and it gives the site at Buzzardstown a slightly elevated, watchful quality that you might not expect from a burial ground on the northern fringes of County Dublin.

The oldest part of the graveyard is the raised area immediately surrounding the church, a configuration that often points to a long continuity of sacred use on a single patch of ground. Within this section, 18th and 19th century gravestones sit alongside modern ones, and scattered among them are a number of re-used architectural fragments, pieces of earlier stonework that have been repurposed as grave markers or boundary elements, a practice that was common when older structures fell out of use and their dressed stone became too useful to waste. The graveyard has been extended northward on two separate occasions, suggesting a community that grew steadily over the centuries and needed the additional space. The site was surveyed by Egan in 1993 as part of an earlier recording effort, and was later revisited as part of the Fingal Historic Graveyards project in 2008, which systematically documented burial grounds across the Fingal area of north County Dublin.

The graveyard is associated with the church recorded under the reference DU013-010001, which gives it a formal place in the archaeological record for the region. The curved western wall, rising above road level, is the most immediately noticeable feature from the outside, and it is worth pausing there before entering to get a sense of how the ground level inside differs from the road below. The oldest gravestones and any visible architectural fragments are concentrated in the raised central section around the church, so that is the area to focus on if the early material is what you are after.