The local name for the spot is Guaire na gCnámha, which translates roughly as something like "the burial ground of the bones", and the tradition attached to it is specific enough to carry weight: people spoke of bones being exposed when an exceptionally high tide washed away the sand, an event placed a few generations back from when Tim Robinson recorded the account in 1985. Sand-dune burials of this kind are not unusual along the Irish Atlantic coast; shifting dunes have a way of concealing and then slowly surrendering what lies beneath them, sometimes over centuries.

What makes this site quietly unusual is how thoroughly it has resisted confirmation. A researcher who walked the north-eastern shoreline and checked around the eastern side of the island's lake in April 2014 found nothing. No bones, no visible disturbance, no surface trace of whatever was once reported. The place exists mainly as a name and a memory, recorded by Robinson from local oral tradition and passed on without physical corroboration. Whether the burial was early Christian, pre-Christian, or something else entirely is unknown, because the site has never yielded anything solid enough to date or examine. It remains a location defined almost entirely by what people once said they saw, and by a tide that has not obligingly repeated itself.