What makes it linger in the mind is less its age than its name. Locally it is known as Cnocán na hUlta, which translates roughly as the little hill of the Ulstermen, a designation that raises more questions than it answers about who exactly lies there and why people from Ulster would have been buried so far from home on a remote Atlantic island.

The site is rectangular, measuring approximately 60 metres by 38 metres, and appears on both the first and second editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, suggesting it was well established and recognised as a formal burial place by the nineteenth century. Inside, the graves are not all of the same type or period. Stone-lined graves, a form of burial in which the body is enclosed within flat slabs rather than a coffin, sit alongside more recent modern graves, indicating the ground has been in continuous use across a considerable span of time. A modern extension to the south and south-west has expanded the original enclosure, as the community on Maínis continued to need the space. The local name was recorded by Tim Robinson, the cartographer and writer whose meticulous mapping of Connemara and the Aran Islands in the 1980s preserved a great deal of place-name knowledge that might otherwise have been lost.