The site, recorded under the older placename of Kilgarvan, occupies what is now Pearse Square, and its existence would be entirely unknown to most people crossing it today.

The graveyard was noted in 1894 by Coleman, who placed it at the location then known as the Old Square in Queenstown, the name by which Cobh was officially known for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was associated with a nearby church, and together the two features suggest an earlier layer of ecclesiastical settlement beneath the present streetscape. By the time Zajac and colleagues revisited the site in 1995, nothing of the graveyard remained visible. The square had absorbed it entirely, leaving only the documentary record as evidence of what once stood there.