That slight subsidence, roughly a metre across, is what remains of a slab-lined grave that spent an unknown number of centuries tucked into a low cliff face before the Atlantic began to reclaim it.

A slab-lined grave is exactly what it sounds like: a burial pit whose walls are formed from flat stones set upright on edge, with smaller chocking stones wedged between them and overlapping slabs laid across the top to form a roof. When coastal erosion began exposing this one at Lackan, the Office of Public Works stepped in and carried out a rescue excavation in 1991. What they found was already substantially gone. The grave had been cut into a layer of shingle sitting above limestone bedrock, oriented roughly east to west with the head placed at the western end, a common Christian burial convention, though whether this particular grave is early medieval or later is not recorded. The western end had been entirely destroyed by the time excavators arrived; only the eastern metre survived intact. From that remnant, the poorly preserved leg bones of an adult, or more probably a younger individual, were recovered. Once the excavation was complete, the limestone slab walls were left where they lay. The sea finished the job not long afterwards.

Locally, the grave was always called the Fisherman's Grave, a name that attaches a human story to a burial that otherwise left almost no trace. Whether the name reflects a genuine tradition about who was buried there, or simply the kind of explanatory folklore that accumulates around solitary graves near the water, is impossible to say now. The grave itself is gone. The name, at least, remains.