The carved stone fragment, originally part of St Mary's Church, was salvaged and laid near the boundary wall of the graveyard, doing quiet second duty among the post-1700 memorial stones that surround it. It is the kind of small, easy-to-miss detail that tells you a great deal about how people have always found use in what was already there.

The ruins of St Mary's medieval parish church form the northern boundary of the graveyard, a semi-circular enclosure measuring roughly 29 metres north to south and 62 metres east to west. The site sits on demesne lands, meaning it was part of the private estate attached to Lucan House, which stands about 80 metres to the west. That arrangement had legal consequences. Under the Irish Church Act of 1869, which disestablished the Church of Ireland and reorganised the ownership of church properties across the country, burial grounds on private demesnes were transferred to the owners of those estates. On the 6th of December 1875, the Irish Church Temporalities Commission formally vested Lucan Burial Ground in Charles W. Hamilton and Jas. R. Gordon, and their heirs. By 1889, however, the Local Government Board had issued an order prohibiting further interments at the site, listing it among a number of burial grounds in the Celbridge Union subject to closure. The graveyard did not simply fade from administrative view after that; in August 1922, the Celbridge No. 2 Rural District Council was still advertising for tenders to repair the boundary walls at Lucan and several neighbouring burial grounds.

The graveyard is accessed via a laneway from Lucan village, with an entrance gate on the eastern side of the enclosure. The Griffeen River runs roughly 50 metres to the east, through the centre of the village, so the approach from the village side is straightforward enough. The ground slopes gently down toward the Liffey to the north-northwest, which gives the site a slightly open, unhurried quality. The reused mullion near the western boundary wall is worth looking for specifically; it sits close to the church ruins and can be easy to pass without registering what it actually is.