On St Macdara's Island, the small uninhabited island off the Connemara coast also known as Cruach na Cara, exactly this happened. The 1838 OS six-inch map marks a burial ground to the west of the island's early church, and the 1899 resurvey still labels it, though now as disused. When the site was inspected in August 1984, an intensive search of that area turned up nothing at all.

The more likely location for the missing burial ground, it turned out, is a small subrectangular enclosure situated roughly fifteen metres to the north-east of the church. Inside it, numerous boulders protrude from the ground in a manner consistent with grave-markers, quietly suggesting a cemetery that the cartographers simply got wrong, or perhaps recorded from imperfect local knowledge. The southern half of the enclosure contains a ruined leacht, which is a low commemorative cairn or altar-like structure associated with early Christian devotion, as well as a cross-slab, a flat stone carved with a cross, both typical features of early Irish ecclesiastical sites. Together they place this enclosure firmly within the same devotional landscape as the church itself, which is dedicated to St Macdara, a sixth-century saint whose feast day still draws traditional currachs to the island each summer.