What gives the site its particular character is not the headstones themselves, which range from the eighteenth century to the present day, but the carved architectural fragments from a medieval cloister arcade that lie scattered among them, dislodged from their original settings and now resting at odd angles between the graves, half-buried or propped against walls.

The graveyard is oval in plan, measuring roughly 79 metres from north-west to south-east and 57 metres from north-east to south-west. That shape is significant. Oval ecclesiastical enclosures are a characteristic feature of early Irish monastic sites, and the stone wall that defines this one was almost certainly constructed on top of, or immediately following the line of, an earlier enclosing boundary associated with a monastery that predates the medieval priory. The Augustinian priory itself, which takes up most of the western half of the enclosure, was established on the island and represents a later phase of organised religious life on the same ground. The Augustinians were an order of canons following a rule derived from the writings of St Augustine, and their houses typically included a cloister, a rectangular courtyard of covered walkways. The decorated stonework from that arcade is what now lies scattered across the burial ground, a quiet reminder that the priory did not survive intact.