There is nothing to see here. No headstones, no enclosure, no mounded earth. Whatever lies beneath the southern slope of the island's low central hillock has left no visible surface trace whatsoever, which in itself makes the place a quietly unsettling kind of site.

Local tradition holds that the burials are connected to the Famine, the catastrophic period of the late 1840s when mass death overwhelmed the established rituals of burial across the west of Ireland, and bodies were interred quickly, in numbers, and often without the usual markers. Islands and marginal ground were sometimes used for this purpose, partly from necessity and partly because they were already associated, in older custom, with burial outside consecrated ground. The site appears by name on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map published in 1899, though even then it was not clearly delineated, suggesting that the knowledge of what the place was had already begun to slip from public record into local memory alone. That the name Dead Island survived while the graves themselves became invisible speaks to how tenaciously place-names can hold information that the landscape itself no longer shows.