At Donabate, on the northern fringes of County Dublin, this effect is particularly pronounced. The walled enclosure rises somewhere between one and one and a half metres above the surrounding external ground level, giving the impression that the dead here occupy a kind of elevated platform, separated from the living not just by stone walls but by the ground itself.

The graveyard is roughly square in plan, measuring approximately forty metres across, and sits on high ground that slopes downward to the north, with the village green lying to the south. The memorials inside date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and are orientated east to west, arranged around all sides of a church and an adjacent residential tower, both of which are recorded as separate archaeological features within the same complex. Raised graveyards of this kind are not uncommon in Ireland; centuries of burial, along with the accumulation of soil and organic material, can gradually lift the ground level within a walled enclosure well above the terrain outside. What makes the Donabate example more immediately visible is what has happened along the eastern wall. Construction of relatively new housing in that area involved cutting away the external ground level, which has undermined the wall's foundations and caused part of it to collapse into the back gardens of those properties.

The site is accessible from the village itself, with the green providing a natural point of orientation to the south. The collapsed section of the eastern wall is worth noting if you approach from that direction, as it illustrates in a rather direct way just how much the graveyard's interior sits proud of its surroundings. The church and residential tower within the enclosure are separately catalogued features, so visitors with an interest in the wider complex will find more than the graveyard alone to examine. The memorials, distributed around all sides of both structures, reward a slow circuit rather than a quick glance from the gate.