They lean now against the boundary walls of a former barracks, displaced from the ground where the people beneath them were buried, arranged in rows like books returned to the wrong shelf. A few chest tombs, the low rectangular stone boxes that were a common 19th-century burial form, still sit in their original positions, but the general effect is of a place quietly rearranged, its original order quietly lost.

The graveyard sits in Fermoy, in the townland of Carrignagroghera, on a roughly square plot of about sixty metres to a side. Its southern and western edges are defined by the walls of the adjacent Old Barracks, and its northern boundary follows a road that itself runs along the course of a former railway line, giving the site a kind of layered obsolescence, one infrastructure overtaking another. The headstones that survive are 19th century in date, and many of them belong to soldiers and their families, which makes the proximity of the barracks feel less like coincidence and more like purpose. Fermoy was a significant garrison town during the 19th century, and this small ground appears to have served the military community quartered there. The site was already marked as a 'Grave Yard' on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, suggesting it was well established by that point.