The enclosure is irregular in shape, roughly forty metres north to south and fifty-three metres east to west, and that slight asymmetry gives it the feeling of a space that was bounded by older features long since vanished rather than laid out to any tidy plan. The church is gone. What remains is the graveyard that once surrounded it, and the graveslabs that have accumulated since.

The site originally enclosed the church of Merrion, which appears on the Down Survey map of 1655 to 1656, the ambitious land survey carried out under the direction of William Petty during the Cromwellian period, as the 'chapel of Merryon'. The spelling reflects an older anglicisation of the place name, noted by Joyce in 1912. That the chapel warranted inclusion on the Down Survey at all suggests it was a functioning or at least recognisable structure in the mid-seventeenth century, though it did not survive into the modern period. The graveslabs visible in the graveyard today date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so the burial ground continued in active use well after the church itself disappeared.

The graveyard lies on the south side of Churchyard Lane, off the coast road, and is enclosed by a boundary wall. Because it sits close to the road in what is now a fairly built-up stretch of south Dublin, it is easy to overlook as a through-route rather than a destination. The graveslabs are the main thing to look for once inside; weathering has worn many of them considerably, as is typical of limestone and sandstone markers from this period, so earlier inscriptions can be difficult to read. There is no church structure to examine, which means the site rewards a kind of attention to absence, to the outline of what the irregular enclosure once contained.