Two skulls were visible roughly two metres apart, aligned along an ENE-WSW axis with the skulls positioned to the east and apparently facing south. A third skull was noted in line with the other two. The find was communicated by M. Gibbons, and Cruach na Cara was not alone; the same series of storms revealed previously unrecorded burials at two other locations in the same area, suggesting that the coastline had been concealing a scattered, forgotten funerary landscape.

The site lies approximately 118 metres almost due south of St. MacDara's Church, a detail that is unlikely to be coincidental. St. MacDara's Island, a small and exposed lump of rock off the south Connemara coast, is one of the more atmospheric early Christian sites in the west of Ireland. The church associated with St. MacDara is a small oratory, thought to date in some form to the early medieval period, and the island was a place of pilgrimage for centuries, with fishermen traditionally dipping their sails three times in honour of the saint as they passed. Burial close to a sacred site was entirely consistent with early Christian and medieval practice in Ireland, where communities sought proximity to holy ground for their dead. What is unusual here is not the proximity to the church but the exposure, the skulls appearing on the surface of a storm-scoured shoreline with no recorded context, no excavation, and no prior documentation. The alignment of the burials, with heads to the east and the body presumably extending westward, follows a pattern associated with Christian burial tradition, in which the dead were laid out to face the rising sun and, by extension, the east from which resurrection was expected.