They sit quietly among the inscribed monuments, easy to overlook, but they point to a history that predates every readable epitaph in the ground.

The graveyard does not appear at all on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, and only earns the label 'Grave Yd.' on the 1921 edition. Yet local tradition holds that it served as a burial place during the Famine, connected to the Belmullet Workhouse, which opened in 1851. Workhouse graveyards were often unmarked by design or by necessity; the dead were many and resources were scarce, and uninscribed field stones were a practical substitute for cut headstones. The earliest inscribed marker in the graveyard dates only to 1896, leaving a gap of several decades in which the unnamed stones do the quiet work of commemoration. Adding another layer to the site's character, clay pipes recovered from the ground span the period 1850 to 1910, evidence that the custom of smoking beside a freshly filled grave was practised here with some regularity. The pipes suggest a community ritual in which mourners gathered, smoked, and left their pipes behind, a tradition documented elsewhere in Ireland but rarely so tangibly preserved.

The graveyard is enclosed by a mortared stone wall and reached by a short trackway, roughly 70 metres long, running south from the main road. It sits on farmland beside the northern end of Blacksod Bay, about a kilometre from Belmullet town. The uninscribed markers are interspersed throughout the site rather than segregated to one corner, which means the contrast between named and unnamed dead is visible almost anywhere you stand within the enclosure.