That near-total absence is itself the curious thing. The headstones, arranged around the perimeter rather than scattered across the ground, give the space the quality of an outdoor room, tidy and contained, its origins only legible if you know what once stood here.

The friary was founded in 1264 by Thomas Theobald FitzWalter, and it formed part of the medieval borough of Arklow, one of the Anglo-Norman urban settlements that took root along the Wicklow coast in the thirteenth century. Dominican friaries of this period typically comprised a church and a set of claustral buildings, that is, the enclosed ranges of rooms arranged around a central cloister that housed the community's daily life. At Abbeylands, portions of these structures were apparently still visible as late as the mid-eighteenth century, but nothing now remains above ground. What visitors find instead is a graveyard whose surviving fabric belongs entirely to a later period, with headstones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including carved examples attributed to local masons Denis Cullen and James Byrne.

The headstones themselves are worth a close look. Regional gravestone carving in Ireland during this period developed distinct local styles, and named craftsmen are not always easy to trace, which makes attributions like these relatively unusual. The square, walled enclosure gives the site a clear boundary that may itself reflect the footprint of the earlier monastic complex, though the friary's stones are long gone, absorbed into later building or simply lost.