The place is known by two names that each carry their own history. Forlorn Point takes its name from the Yola language, a now-extinct dialect once spoken in parts of Wexford, where the word simply meant 'foreland'. The alternative name, Crossfarnoge, comes from Irish and translates as 'the cross of alder'. The outcrop itself is modest, roughly 28 metres along its longer axis and no more than 15 metres wide, and it is now connected to the mainland by a causeway. It is the kind of place that reads as marginal, an afterthought of coastline, which makes what lay beneath it all the more unexpected.

After the storm-revealed remains were recovered by Maeve Sikora of the National Museum of Ireland, a second burial was identified nearby. In November 2017, archaeologist Catherine McLoughlin excavated a four-metre square area and recovered the second skeleton. Both individuals had been laid out roughly north to south, with their skulls at the southern end, and both had been damaged by sea erosion and by later pits cut into the ground. Radiocarbon dating placed the first skeleton, a male aged over 45 at death, within the period AD 1526 to 1802, with the strongest probability falling between 1632 and 1681. The second burial was more fragmentary and represented a young adult of indeterminate sex, aged somewhere between 13 and 25, whose remains date most probably to between 1735 and 1806. The working interpretation is that these are two separate burials of shipwreck victims, one from the seventeenth century and one from the eighteenth. The excavation also produced a broken metal point, two pieces of flint, and a total of ten impacted lead bullets, some recovered with the skeletons and others from the surrounding area. The bullets tell their own ambiguous story, one that the archaeological record alone cannot fully resolve.