The fosse appears to be a relatively recent addition to the site, which lends the whole arrangement an air of deliberate theatre, as though the families interred here wished the ground itself to announce their separateness. Wrought iron double gates open from a wide causeway entrance at the south-east, leading into an oval enclosure of roughly 95 metres by 70 metres, its centre thick with bushes and large chest-tombs, its south-eastern quarter marked by low, uninscribed grave-markers whose anonymity sits in sharp contrast to the monument at the centre, an imitation High Cross erected to Henry Arthur Herbert, the founder of Muckross House. The families buried here, the Herberts and the Rose Vincents, were the principal occupants of that great house on the shores of Lough Leane, and they arranged their afterlife accordingly.

The graveyard's strange texture comes partly from what it contains and partly from what has been lost or obscured within it. In the south-west quadrant stands a small rectangular mortuary chapel, roughly 7.5 metres by 5 metres, built on or very near the footprint of a considerably older church; a cruciform structure is still marked on the 1848 Ordnance Survey map at this location. A wall plaque inside the chapel records that it was built as a family mortuary by Maurice Hussey of Cahernane in 1714, though one door opening, with its single cut-limestone jamb, is thought to survive from the earlier building. The chapel itself is an oddly ornate piece of work for its modest scale, with a pointed vaulted plank-centred roof, corbels set into the north and south walls to carry the roof centring, and a stepped, tower-like west gable finished with a bellcote. Tucked somewhere in this same enclosure, though precisely where no one now knows, lies the grave of Rudolf Erich Raspe, the German author best remembered for writing the literary version of the Baron Munchausen tales. Raspe died in 1794 and was buried here, according to a 1976 account by Barrington, a fittingly ambiguous end for a man whose most famous creation was the world's greatest liar.