Long after the last inhabitants left, people kept bringing their dead there. That continuity, a burial ground outlasting the community it served, points to the kind of deep attachment to place that is not easily explained by practicality alone.

The earliest evidence of human presence on the island comes in the form of two wooden structures: a circular hut, of the kind associated with early medieval or earlier settlement in Ireland, and a rectangular wooden building. It is this second structure that sits at the heart of the island's archaeological interest, having been found in association with a group of burials. The pattern suggests that even in its earliest phase, the island's identity was bound up with the dead as much as the living. What followed that initial occupation remains only partially visible in the record, but the thread of burial use continued well beyond the island's final desertion as a settled place, which speaks to how firmly it had become established in local memory as consecrated or significant ground.