The original burying ground at Mullaghavorneen was a modest, roughly circular enclosure, measuring around 45 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, reached by a laneway from the public road. That shape, subcircular and intimate, is a form commonly associated with early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, where the curve of the boundary can echo the outline of a much older sacred enclosure. By 1837, when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it, the space was already a working burial ground, with a church sitting close against its south-western boundary.

The memorials surviving within the original enclosure date from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, placing the visible funerary record across a period that spans the Penal era and the decades that followed Catholic Emancipation. Over time, the site was absorbed into a far larger graveyard, rectangular and considerably more institutional in character, measuring roughly 310 metres east to west and 160 metres north to south. That expansion was a product of the nineteenth century, with a further extension added in the twentieth. The result is a layered site: the original subcircular ground now occupies the western end of a cemetery bounded by block concrete walls, post-and-wire fences, and clay embankments, with multiple gates and a single stile providing access from different approaches. The contrast between the organic shape of the older space and the utilitarian geometry of what surrounds it is, in its quiet way, the whole story of how Irish burial practice changed across two centuries.