Measuring roughly 27 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, it is a modest, rectangular space, but what lies beneath or, more precisely, what once stood above the soil here is what gives it an unusual quality. The dead are buried where friars once slept, gathered, and prayed.

The friary to which this ground belonged is only partially preserved. The church of St. Molleran, which sits to the north of the graveyard on the south bank of the River Suir, incorporates portions of the medieval Franciscan structure, though much of the original complex has long since disappeared. A Franciscan friary would typically have been organised around a cloister, an open courtyard flanked by covered walkways, with the church on one side and the living quarters, including dormitories and a chapter house, arranged around the remaining three sides. According to Patrick Conlan, writing in 2003, it was precisely this area, the cloister and living quarters, that extended southward from the church into the space now used as a burial ground. The medieval fabric of those domestic ranges is gone, absorbed into centuries of burials and ground disturbance, but the spatial logic of the original friary can still be read in the relationship between the standing church and the ground beside it.