What strikes a visitor is the layering of time in a relatively compact space, roughly fifty metres by forty-five, enclosed now by a modern stone wall. Within that boundary, kerbed rectangular burial plots are arranged with headstones spanning the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, meaning that people were still choosing this ancient monastic ground for their dead long after the abbey itself had fallen silent.

The abbey is a Cistercian foundation, and the graveyard occupies the ground immediately surrounding the church. The Cistercians, a reform movement within Benedictine monasticism, favoured remote and agriculturally marginal land, which may explain the choice of this quiet valley in the Burren. The continuity of burial use here is worth noting: the headstones in the plots run across three centuries, suggesting that the site retained genuine local significance as a place of interment well into living memory, even as the monastic buildings themselves became ruin.