No boundary wall, no headstones, no earthwork hollow to suggest where the dead were laid. The ground simply looks like ground, which is part of what makes its recorded presence so quietly unsettling.

What is known comes largely from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which shows a settlement occupying the same ground where the burial site is believed to lie. That settlement is now deserted and ruined, part of the broader pattern of island abandonment that emptied so many small Irish communities across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alongside the burial ground, a bullaun stone has been recorded at the same location. Bullauns are boulders or bedrock stones with one or more rounded depressions ground into their surface; they appear at early medieval ecclesiastical and sacred sites across Ireland, and their presence here hints that this corner of the island may have had a religious or ritual significance reaching back well before the 1842 map was drawn.

Horse Island is a small and now uninhabited place, and reaching the northern shore where these features are recorded means crossing water as well as land. There is nothing to see once you arrive in any conventional sense, which is precisely the point. The absence itself is the thing worth sitting with.