The graveyard at Swords Glebe sits on a natural rise overlooking the village below, its trapezoidal boundary wall enclosing a space roughly seventy metres long and fifty metres wide. What makes it quietly arresting is the layering of time contained within those walls: a medieval church, a round tower, and headstones spanning several centuries occupy the same elevated ground, each belonging to a different chapter of the site's use.

Round towers, the slender stone structures built in early medieval Ireland, served multiple purposes, including as bell towers and places of refuge, and their presence in a graveyard typically signals a monastic origin of considerable age. The church and tower at Swords Glebe each carry their own monument numbers in the national record, suggesting they have been assessed as distinct and significant structures. The headstones, concentrated in the southern portion of the enclosure, are largely of eighteenth and nineteenth century date. Among the earlier examples is a sandstone headstone erected by one Charles McAlister in 1760, identified by the Fingal Historic Graves Project in 2008 as a seventeenth century stone, meaning the slab itself predates the inscription carved onto it. That kind of reuse is not uncommon in older graveyards, where a family might repurpose an existing marker rather than commission a new one.

The graveyard has been in recent use, so it is not abandoned or inaccessible in the way that some historic burial grounds become over time. Visitors approaching from the village will find the site elevated above the surrounding landscape, with the Ward river to the east. The most dramatic vantage point is the southern edge, where the ground drops away steeply. The headstones worth seeking out are gathered in that southern section, and the McAlister stone, as one of the earlier identified markers, is a reasonable starting point for anyone interested in the Fingal Historic Graves Project's survey work, which documented inscriptions and conditions across the region.