The Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map records the graveyard with the terse annotation "G. Yd. (Dis.)", a bureaucratic shorthand that does little to hint at what came before: a medieval nunnery, a peculiarly shaped elliptical church, and, stranger still, the remnant of a Viking assembly mound that once dominated this corner of the city.

The parish of St Andrew's was probably founded in the eleventh century, according to Wheeler and Craig writing in 1948, though its original church stood on Dame Street, just outside the old city walls. At the Reformation the parish was dissolved and the church put to distinctly secular use, serving at various points as a mint and a vice-regal stable. Archbishop Laud made efforts to revive it, but it was not until 1665 that an Act of Parliament formally re-created the parish. The church that followed, built between 1670 and 1674 to a design by architect William Dodson, was unusual by any measure: elliptical in plan, it was known simply as the "round" church, and a record of its appearance survives in a drawing made by Francis Place. That building stood on ground already layered with prior occupation, positioned close to the Danish Thingmote, a Viking-era assembly mound, the kind of earthwork where public gatherings and legal proceedings were held, which was not levelled until 1685. The site also partially overlies what the Ordnance Survey maps identify as the Nunnery of St Mary de Hogge, a medieval religious house that has otherwise left almost no trace above ground. Rocque's 1756 map of Dublin shows the graveyard clearly, enclosing the round church in its distinctly oval form.

The present church building is a nineteenth-century structure, now de-consecrated, and the graveyard has long been out of use. The site sits on Suffolk Street, close to the junction with St Andrew Street, in an area of central Dublin that sees considerable foot traffic without many passers-by pausing to consider what is underfoot. For those interested in the layered archaeology of the city, the Ordnance Survey's 1892 sheet for this part of Dublin, digitised by UCD Library, gives a useful sense of how the site appeared before the twentieth century reshaped the streetscape around it.