What makes the site quietly peculiar is the arrangement of its headstones: a line of 19th-century inscribed markers has been stood upright along both the eastern and western walls, suggesting at some point a tidying or consolidation of the ground rather than any original plan. The effect is of a room lined with stone pages, the inscriptions facing inward.

The graveyard sits to the south-east of St. Anne's Church of Ireland church, a Cork landmark with a long Shandon association, and to the west of what was the North Infirmary Hospital, a institution that served the city's north side for well over a century. The enclosure is roughly rectangular, measuring approximately 46 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west. Three sides are bounded by high stone walls; the northern boundary is lower, finished with iron railings. Among the surviving monuments, the chest tombs, substantial above-ground rectangular burial structures common in Protestant burial grounds from the 17th century onward, remain in their original positions, with the earliest dating from 1796. Several pyramidal gravemarkers also survive, a less common form that tapers to a point and was favoured in certain periods as a way of signalling status without the expense of a full chest tomb. Excavations carried out in 2001 and 2002 returned findings connected with the site, suggesting the ground holds more history beneath its surface than the visible monuments alone convey.