There are no inscribed headstones, no clearly bounded graveyard, no tidy rows of markers. Instead, the ground itself holds the evidence: scattered low cairns, heaps of stone distributed across the interior of the monastic cashel, a roughly circular dry-stone enclosure that would have defined and protected the early medieval monastic settlement here. The cairns are quiet, easy to overlook, and that is precisely what makes them worth attention.

The burial ground was first formally noted in 1860, when a writer named Gordon Hills observed that the greensward around the eastern group of churches on the island could not be dug without bringing up evidence of a graveyard beneath. By 1900, Francis Joseph Bigger was remarking on the stone heaps scattered across the island, connecting them to the old practice of carn burial, in which a mound of stones is raised directly over a grave rather than a carved marker erected above it. This was not an unusual tradition in Ireland; the word cairn, from the Irish carn, describes exactly such a mound, and Bigger noted it as a custom still familiar to him at the time he was writing. An early Ordnance Survey map from 1836 adds another detail, marking what appears to be a vault in the eastern quadrant of the enclosure, though its precise relationship to the wider burial ground remains unclear. No enclosed burial area is visible on the surface today, and the cairns themselves are the most tangible hint of what lies beneath the grass.