Wedge-shaped, roughly sixty metres from north to south and narrowing from a hundred metres wide at its broader northern end to around sixty at the south, it is enclosed by a stone wall with a gateway facing east. That shape is not accidental in the way that organic, centuries-old burial grounds often are; it feels almost planned, which in a sense it may have been.

The site is thought to date from 1633, when Sir William St Leger constructed a church here beside his residence, bringing a formal Anglican parish presence to Doneraile. Whether this replaced or simply continued an older tradition of Christian burial in the area is genuinely uncertain. A church called 'Dunrayl' appears in the Papal Taxation of 1291, a medieval survey of ecclesiastical properties across Ireland, but the general scholarly view is that this earlier foundation probably sat at the nearby Oldcourt graveyard rather than on the present site. So there is a gap of sorts, a question of continuity that the ground itself does not resolve. The graveyard remains in use today, with the burial area concentrated to the south and east of the Church of Ireland parish church that still stands at its northern end. Among the stones, there are many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century headstones and a number of chest tombs, the latter being low box-shaped above-ground monuments common in Irish Protestant burial tradition. The antiquarian James Grove White documented most of these in detail in publications from the 1890s through to the 1920s, and noted that certain families were interred in vaults beneath the church itself. Scattered throughout the graveyard are low, uninscribed grave markers, some of which have been recently displaced, their original positions and identities now unclear.