The plot measures roughly two and three-quarter metres long and less than a metre wide, oriented northwest to southeast, and it lies close to the rocky waterline, which goes some way towards explaining the story attached to it.

Local tradition holds that the grave belongs to a man washed ashore here, a stranger claimed by the sea and buried where he landed. The cartographer and writer Tim Robinson recorded it as a grave in 1980, and the detail about the drowned stranger came from Robinson and a local source, R. Walsh. The practice of burying the sea's dead at or near the place they came ashore was not unusual along the western Irish coast, where communities understood both the practical difficulty of transporting a body inland and the older feeling that such people occupied an ambiguous place, outside parish boundaries in more than one sense. A body with no known identity, no known parish, and no known faith could not always be given a churchyard burial, and so the shore itself became the cemetery. The stones set on edge to define this particular plot are a minimal but deliberate form of marking, enough to show that whoever laid them out intended the spot to be remembered.