The claim is a geographic one, rooted in the site's position at the extreme western edge of the landmass of the continent, and it gives an ordinary-looking field of graves an quietly extraordinary distinction. The crosses themselves are unassuming: rough-cut slabs shaped into grave-markers rather than finely worked ecclesiastical sculpture, the kind of stones that could easily be passed over without a second glance.

The church to which this graveyard belongs, known in Irish as An Teampall, has documentary roots going back to at least the end of the thirteenth century, when a parish church at Dunquin appears in the Calendar of Documents relating to Ireland. By 1615, however, a Royal Visitation recorded the vicarage of Dunquin as 'waste voyde', and by 1756 the church was already described as being in ruins. What remains today is a rubble-built rectangular structure, its walls still legible but long since open to the Atlantic sky. Dunne's 2010 graveyard survey recorded four cross slabs at Dunquin in total, two of which correspond to the pair of rough stone grave-markers first catalogued in the Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey compiled by J. Cuppage in 1986. The site sits 8.5 kilometres west of Ventry and roughly 15 kilometres from Dingle town, close to the tip of a peninsula that has always faced outward towards the ocean rather than inward towards the rest of Ireland.