There is no garden there now, and there may never have been one in any conventional sense. What the name preserves is a memory of solitary religious life, and somewhere within it, according to local tradition, a monk was buried. No grave mound survives, no bones are visible, and nothing marks the spot. The burial exists now almost entirely as an absence.

What once marked the grave was a cross-slab, a simple inscribed stone of the kind used throughout early medieval Ireland to identify a person of religious significance. Sometime in the early twentieth century, that stone was moved, carried roughly four kilometres to the south-east and placed in Killemlagh graveyard, where it now serves as a family grave marker. Scholars O'Sullivan and Sheehan, writing in 1996, identified it as a cross-inscribed stone that had previously covered a tomb. The stone has a documented existence; it is the grave itself, and the life it commemorates, that have dissolved into landscape and local memory.

The Hermit's Garden sits on cliff-top ground that would have suited an early Christian anchorite well: remote, exposed, with the kind of austere beauty that drew monks to the western edges of Ireland during the early medieval period. Whether the buried figure was a hermit in the strict sense, living in deliberate isolation, or simply a monk associated with a nearby community, cannot now be known. What remains is the name, the empty ground, and the displaced stone, each piece separated from the others by time and circumstance.