What makes the graveyard at Churchtown unusual is not simply its age but the way its history has been physically stacked: the older fabric of the church itself lies partly buried beneath a cluster of 18th and 19th century burial vaults, including a classical limestone mausoleum, a monument type more commonly associated with grand estates and civic ambition than with a quiet roadside site a short distance from a market town.

The graveyard sits on a gentle south-facing slope roughly 750 metres north-northwest of Newcastle West, on the western side of the road. It is large by rural standards, running approximately 100 metres north to south and 80 metres east to west, and the church whose ruin anchors the southern-central portion of the site was once the parish church of Newcastle West itself. The mausoleum that now crowds against the church's eastern end belongs to the tradition of neoclassical funerary architecture that became fashionable among prosperous families in the late 18th and 19th centuries, when cut limestone and columned facades were used to signal permanence and social standing. Chest tombs, low rectangular monuments with a raised lid, are scattered to the south of the church, and the earliest headstone recorded on site dates to the 1770s, though the graveyard's use almost certainly predates that inscription by a considerable margin.

The site remains in use and is neatly maintained, which means visitors will find it accessible and easy to read as a landscape. Headstones from the 19th and 20th centuries concentrate to the north of the church, so moving southward through the graveyard is broadly a movement backward in time, towards the older monuments clustered around the ruin. The mausoleum and burial vaults are most legible from the east end of the church, where their relationship to the older structure is clearest. The site is on the west side of the road and presents no particular difficulty of access, though as with any working graveyard, quiet and care are the appropriate approach.