What makes it quietly arresting is not its view but what excavation revealed beneath the surface: forty-two graves, carefully arranged, whose occupants have entirely dissolved into the earth. The acidity of the soil destroyed every trace of human bone, yet phosphorous sampling confirmed that people were once buried here in considerable number. The dead are gone without physical trace, leaving only the architecture of their interment behind.

The graves are arranged in east-west rows that follow the curving inner face of an enclosure wall, a layout consistent with Early Christian monastic or ecclesiastical burial practice in Ireland, roughly the sixth to twelfth centuries. Most are lintel graves, a construction method in which the sides and ends of a pit are lined with upright stone slabs and the whole thing roofed with flat cover stones, creating a stone-lined box around the body. Internally, these graves average two metres long, forty centimetres wide, and thirty-five centimetres deep. A few are simple dug graves with no stone lining. The western edge of the cemetery is marked by a small slab-shrine, a type of miniature stone structure associated with early Irish Christianity, often built to house relics or mark a sacred boundary. Notably, none of the graves retained a marker in its original position, though numerous cross-slabs turned up lying loose nearby, displaced at some point from wherever they once stood. The site was documented in detail by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region.