A road running northeast out of Celbridge, County Kildare, was laid around 1725 with a certain indifference to what lay in its path. According to Kirkpatrick, writing in 1896, the new route was cut directly through the existing graveyard at Donaghcumper, slicing the burial ground in two. It is a quietly unsettling detail: the living rerouting their infrastructure straight through the dead.

What remains on the southern roadside is the older portion of the graveyard, a slightly raised rectangular area measuring roughly 33 metres east to west and 30 metres wide. The elevation itself is a clue, that modest lift of ground above the surrounding level pasture being a common sign of long and layered burial activity beneath. A low scarp, between half a metre and just under a metre in height, defines the eastern, southern, and western edges, while a mortared stone wall runs along the northern roadside. Within this older enclosure stands a ruined medieval parish church, and the earliest grave markers that can still be read date to the eighteenth century, though the ground itself is almost certainly older. The graveyard has since been extended to the east and south, expanding the site to a sub-rectangular area of around 120 metres by 70 metres, so the ancient core now sits within a much larger modern whole.