Most visitors come for the cathedral itself, a Victorian Gothic pile completed in 1879, but the ground and walls around it preserve fragments from buildings that no longer exist, reassembled here in ways that reward a slower look.

The most striking of these fragments is a thirteenth-century doorway built into the south wall of the graveyard, featuring a pointed multi-cusped arch in two orders. A cusped arch, in simple terms, is one where the inner curve is cut into a series of small projecting points or lobes, giving it a delicate, almost decorative quality more associated with ecclesiastical interiors than boundary walls. This one is said to have come from the Dominican priory that once stood nearby, a house of friars whose physical remains have otherwise largely vanished from Cork's streetscape. Alongside it, the same wall incorporates a pointed door arch from the seventeenth century and a moulded arch that once framed a piscina, the small basin set into a church wall for draining water used during Mass; this arch is set with two carved limestone heads. Elsewhere in the graveyard stands the Woodcock memorial, dated 1610, which was discovered beneath the north-west corner of a seventeenth-century tower during its demolition in 1865 and re-erected beside the revetment wall to the east of the cathedral. The graveslabs that fill most of the space are largely from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more recent in comparison but no less layered in their own way.

What makes the space genuinely odd is the sense that it functions as an informal repository, absorbing architectural elements from demolished buildings across Cork over several centuries. The south wall in particular repays close attention; the medieval doorway is not displayed as a museum piece but simply built in, as though it always belonged there.