That detail matters enormously, because it shaped who was laid to rest here. Unbaptised infants, those who had died by suicide, and sailors washed ashore from wrecks were all excluded from sanctified ground under Catholic ecclesiastical law, and so they came to places like this instead. Such unconsecrated burial grounds, sometimes called cillíní, were a quiet but widespread feature of Irish religious geography, tucked into marginal land at the edges of townlands, on headlands, or beside ancient ruins. The graves here are still legible: low upright stones mark some plots, others are outlined in drystone construction, the flat fieldwork of grief.

The headland carries more history than the burial ground alone. A castle was reportedly associated with Rinn an Chaisleáin, and when a grave was dug here in the past, tooled masonry was turned up, as recorded by Stagles in 1980. That cut stone could belong to the castle, or equally to a church that once stood somewhere on this ground. In 1756 a writer named Smith noted the ruins of what he called a very ancient church at this location, but no visible trace of it now survives above the surface. The burial ground itself is recorded as a separate feature from the presumed church site, though the two almost certainly shared the same small promontory for centuries, each accumulating the kinds of loss that islanders could not bring elsewhere.