The graves are known locally as the 'Grave of Two Men in Emlagh Bog', and they sit within a wider complex associated with St Brendan, whose name clings to the well nearby. That well is called in Irish Tober-olla-Brenainn, which translates as the Well of St Brendan's Anointing, and both the name and the burials point to a tradition that is specific, locally remembered, and pleasingly strange.

The tradition was recorded by Delap in 1911, drawing on a story that describes St Brendan landing on a clifftop, ascending by steps that seemed almost unnaturally preserved, and then being led inland by an unnamed guide through what the account calls 'the thick of a forest', the same ground that had become Emlagh Bog by the time the story was written down. There he found two dying men who had not been baptised, and who had no access to Christian instruction, but who had sincerely wished to die in the faith. Brendan baptised them, administered what the tradition calls Extreme Unction (the anointing of the dying, a Catholic sacrament), and they died shortly afterwards. The mysterious guide had by then disappeared. The two men were buried where they lay, the well that provided the baptismal water was venerated from that point on, and the pillar-stones, brought from elsewhere, were set to mark the place. Macartney Robbins, writing in 1912 and again in 1942, noted two arrangements of upright slabs at the site, which he described as graves. Several slabs are still visible, protruding through the ground surface just east of the knoll, and may be what remains of those same features.

The site overlooks the Atlantic some 400 metres to the north, and the bog itself preserves the whole complex in a state of wet, quiet isolation. A possible leacht, a type of low cairn or commemorative stone mound associated with early Irish religious sites, is among the miscellaneous features recorded here alongside the more legible crosses and well.