The result is a space that does not quite behave as a graveyard should: walled, subdivided, and entered through a gate in the west wall, it wraps around a Romanesque church on three sides, the church itself occupying the rough centre of the enclosure rather than one end of it.

The graveyard measures approximately 37 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west, and the stone wall that defines it holds more history than its surface suggests. Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan described the ground as thickly-tenanted, with many monuments dating from around 1730 onwards, but the buried evidence goes considerably further back. Beside the entrance gate, a fragment of a late medieval graveslab has been set into the west wall, and a 17th-century slab is embedded nearby in the same wall. A second 17th-century graveslab, including one recorded as recumbent, survives within the enclosure, and in the south-east portion of the graveyard there is a graveslab dating to the 13th or 14th century. Recumbent slabs, laid flat over a burial rather than raised upright, were common across medieval Ireland and often carry carved decoration or inscriptions that mark the social standing of the person beneath. That fragments from the late medieval period have been incorporated into the fabric of the wall itself suggests the site has been in continuous use long enough for its oldest markers to be absorbed, literally, into its boundaries.