A watching brief was undertaken on the area south of the abbey during levelling work to create an access road to the complex. A series of burial structures were exposed documenting the cemetery’s use between the medieval and modern periods. Sixty-seven burials were identified, 23 in masonry-built coffins, 12 in wooden coffins and 31 in earth graves.

Structures belonging to chapels situated south of the present abbey church and pre-dating the latter, were also documented as well as the early cemetery enclosure (12th-15th centuries). A plan of 1772 shows that three side chapels stood along the south wall of the church, identified during the investigation and datable to the 15th-17th centuries. This intervention must have enlarged the cemetery area towards the west, with the consequent demolition of the first enclosure. Between the 17th and 18th centuries, the internal spaces of the cemetery were reorganised, and separate funerary monuments constructed.

In the years 1766-1767, substantial work was undertaken to renew the abbey complex, which involved the demolition and reconstruction of the church’s south wall and reduction of the cemetery space to the east. A limited sondage dug in the south-east corner of the cloister identified two corner pilasters of the transept of the medieval church and a patch of the cloister’s original paving. The watching brief on a trench along the east side of the complex identified the remains of foundations and of two buttresses relating to the modification of the monastery buildings. The function of four columns, arranged in pairs, whose remains were identified at the north end of the trench, is unknown.