On Inishlee, near the northern end of this large freshwater lake in County Mayo, there was said to be a burial ground that quietly fell out of use at some point before living memory. What makes it peculiar is not just its island setting but the near-total absence of any physical trace: it appears on neither the 1838 nor the 1930 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, suggesting that by the time cartographers were working the area, the site had already slipped beneath notice.

The earliest written record comes from the 1838 Ordnance Survey Letters, a series of field memoranda compiled as part of the great nineteenth-century mapping project, in which local knowledge and folklore were gathered alongside topographical data. Those letters note, in language that already sounds like hearsay, that there "was formerly" a burial ground on Inislee, one that "fell into disuse." There may have been a small church associated with it. Writing in 1969, a researcher named Aldridge added a further detail: the ground appears to have functioned as a children's burial ground. Sites of this kind, sometimes called cillíní, were used across Ireland for the interment of unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, often located at liminal spots such as islands, boundaries, or ancient earthworks. When an inspection was carried out in 1996, the site could not be found at all, leaving open the question of whether anything physical ever remained to be found, or whether it had long since been absorbed back into the island's soil.