Enclosed by a rubble stone wall roughly 85 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west, the irregular space presses close against the south, west, and north flanks of the old friary. Some graves are marked with low stones that carry no inscription at all, their occupants unrecorded by anything other than the placement of the stone itself.

A French traveller named de Latocnaye, passing through in 1796 and 1797, left one of the more precise accounts of how the ground was understood at the time. He observed that burials were largely confined to the south and east sides of the church, while the western portion was set aside for a distinct category of the dead: children who had died without baptism, and soldiers and strangers. The separation reflects older theological anxieties around unbaptised infants, who were believed to be excluded from consecrated burial under Catholic practice of the period, as well as a practical wariness about interring outsiders alongside the settled community. De Latocnaye also noted devotional circuits being performed around the buildings, worshippers making a prescribed number of laps while reciting prayers, a form of penitential practice with roots in early Irish Christianity. The older grave-markers still visible to the west of the site date to the eighteenth century, placing them in roughly the era he was describing. The graveyard was extended twice in the nineteenth century, in 1858 and again in 1881, with the later addition likely made to the southwest.