The island is known as Turk Island, and it sits at the eastern side of the entrance to Laurence's Cove, densely overgrown now with ferns and gorse, which together make it feel more remote than its modest size would suggest.

According to Ted O'Sullivan's 1992 local history of Beare Island, the burials date from the pre-Famine period, when a Turkish vessel carrying cholera among its crew put in near the island. The sailors who died were buried on Turk Island, presumably to keep the infected dead away from the settled population on the mainland and Bear Island. Cholera, which spread rapidly in the nineteenth century through contaminated water and close quarters, made quarantine of the sick and isolation of the dead a standard, if grim, precaution. The name of the island may itself preserve a memory of the event, though whether the name came before or after the burial is not recorded. What remains are three graves, each marked by a flagstone, on a small piece of land that the vegetation has largely reclaimed.