The earliest cartographic record shows a compact, roughly square enclosure, about 55 metres north to south and 60 metres east to west, with a rectangular church set against its northern edge. By 1900, the same maps record something considerably larger, a long, sub-rectangular plot stretching roughly 260 metres north to south and 95 metres east to west. The ground had grown, in other words, to more than four times its earlier footprint, a sign of the pressures that population growth and shifting parish needs placed on burial land throughout the nineteenth century.

At the centre of the site stands St Luke's Church of Ireland, a building with a layered history of its own. It was first raised in 1785, a period when the Church of Ireland was consolidating its presence in Cork's suburban parishes. The original structure evidently served well enough for nearly a century, but by 1875 it was rebuilt into its current cruciform plan, the cross-shaped arrangement common in ecclesiastical architecture that allows for transepts extending from either side of the nave. The result is the building visible today, its form reflecting late Victorian ideas about what a properly composed church should look like, grafted onto foundations that were already ninety years old at the time of reconstruction.