In the sand dunes fringing Tramore Strand, the first edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map from 1840 marks three small enclosures with a single word: "Graves". There are no headstones, no monuments, no visible trace of anything beneath the shifting dune grass. The burials, if they are still there at all, have left nothing behind except that quiet cartographic notation, and the knowledge of what happened on the strand in January 1816.

On the 30th of that month, a 350-ton transport vessel called the Sea Horse, under the command of Captain Gibbs, was caught in a severe south-westerly gale while carrying troops of the 2nd Battalion of the 59th Regiment of Foot towards Kinsale. Driven off course, the ship lost much of its rigging and sought shelter in the lee of Newtown Head, but its two anchors could not hold it. Around noon, it beached roughly one kilometre out across the Back Strand. Despite efforts by a crowd gathered on the shore, 363 of the 396 people on board were lost. Some of the dead were buried at Drumcannon graveyard and others at the Church of Ireland in Tramore, but the scale of the death toll makes it near certain that the majority were interred where the sea left them, in the dunes along the strand. Seven years later, in 1823, Lloyd's insurers responded to the disaster by erecting the Metal Man, a cast-iron sailor figure mounted on one of three columns at Newtown Head, with two further columns placed on Brownstown Head, all intended as navigational warnings to ships approaching Tramore Bay. The Metal Man still stands. The graves in the dunes remain unmarked and, for practical purposes, lost.