Stone and earth have been dumped there over the years, and the vegetation has long since taken over, but local memory has preserved what the landscape itself no longer makes obvious: this unremarkable patch of overgrown ground is known in the area as a famine burial ground.

Sites like this one are scattered across Ireland, quiet and largely unmarked, the result of the Great Famine of the 1840s when the scale of death overwhelmed the capacity of established graveyards. The dead were often interred in informal plots, sometimes on the margins of land, sometimes near roads or townland boundaries. At Knocknagoun, the triangular shape of the ground, bounded to the east by a disused lane now fallen out of use, suggests a place that was always somewhat peripheral, a leftover corner of the landscape that became, in extremity, a place of burial. The dumping of stone and earth across the site over subsequent generations has only added to its obscurity, and there is no formal monument or marker to distinguish it from any other forgotten scrap of ground.