A private pedestrian entrance on the southern side connected the burial ground directly to Castle Hyde, the grand demesne house on whose northern boundary the graveyard sits, by means of a wide, hedge-lined walk. The family at Castle Hyde could, in other words, attend burials without stepping onto the public road at all. The main entrance, by contrast, is a pair of wrought iron gates opening from the road to the south. The graveyard itself is subrectangular, measuring roughly 70 metres east to west and 110 metres north to south, enclosed by stone walls on three sides and by farm buildings to the west.

At the southern end of the enclosure stand the ruins of the Church of Ireland parish church of Litter, and it is here that the site's longer history becomes more complicated. A church of Litter was recorded as being in good repair in 1615, which may place an earlier structure on or near this exact ground, though scholars have noted that the medieval parish church of Litter could have stood somewhere else entirely. The headstones visible today date from the mid-eighteenth century onward, suggesting continuous use of the site as a burial place for at least three hundred years, even if the ecclesiastical history stretches back considerably further. The parish name, Litter, is itself a survival of an older Gaelic place-name, a reminder that the administrative geography of the Church of Ireland frequently mapped itself onto far older Irish territorial and religious divisions.