What makes it quietly arresting is not its size, roughly fifty metres long and twenty-five wide, but the fact that people are still being buried inside the roofless shell of a medieval church. The interior walls, open to the sky, have simply become part of the burial ground itself, the distinction between building and graveyard dissolved by time and continued use.

The church ruin at the centre of the site carries the archaeological reference DU008-031001-, indicating its formal recognition as a medieval structure, though the graveyard surrounding it continued in use well beyond that period, with memorials from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries arranged on an east-west alignment around the remains. That orientation is standard in Christian burial practice, the graves following the same axis as the church. When groundwork was carried out ahead of the installation of lighting and ducting, an archaeological test excavation by Hagen in 2002 revealed considerably more beneath the surface than anyone might have expected from such a modest enclosure. Disarticulated human bone came up, along with medieval and post-medieval pottery, a fragment of worked flint, and three distinct archaeological deposits, two of which contained shell. A section of limestone wall, also running east-west, was uncovered as well. The shell deposits in particular suggest the site has a layered history of activity that predates the visible grave memorials by a considerable margin.

The graveyard sits north of the road through Portraine village and looks out over the Dublin coastline and across to Lambay Island, the large privately held island that dominates this stretch of the Irish Sea. The grave memorials run in rows around the church walls and are accessible to anyone visiting, given that the site remains an active burial ground. Worked flint recovered during the 2002 excavation hints that human presence here may extend back further still, beyond the medieval church, though the surface gives little away.