This is one of them, an irregular plot measuring roughly 49.5 metres north to south and 42.1 metres east to west, enclosed by a wooden fence and containing grave markers so weathered that many have become almost illegible. The fact that some of those stones date to the eighteenth century gives the place a quiet gravity; these are not the graves of people whose names were thought worth preserving in any formal way.

Charles Fort itself was built in the 1670s and 1680s by the English Crown to defend the approaches to Kinsale Harbour, a strategically vital anchorage on the south Cork coast. A star fort is a particular kind of defensive structure, its angled bastions designed to eliminate the blind spots that straight walls created, leaving no dead ground for attackers to shelter in. A garrison of that size and duration would inevitably accumulate its dead, soldiers and dependants alike, and burial grounds like this one served that practical need. That two such grounds exist in close proximity to the fort's north-east wall suggests a community of some size living and dying in the fort's shadow over several generations. The worn condition of the markers is not surprising; eighteenth-century headstones in exposed coastal settings in Ireland have often lost their inscriptions entirely, leaving only the rough shape of the stone as evidence that someone once thought the spot worth marking.