Three caves, extending many metres back from the cliff edge, are actively undercutting the ground on which the dead lie, and surveyors working in the wake of the severe storms of winter 2013 to 2014 estimated that as much as three metres of surface may already have been lost from parts of the site. It is an ordinary graveyard in almost every sense, marked by simple stone-lined graves with unworked local stone for head and footstones, the kind of modest, undemonstrative burial practice found across the west of Ireland for centuries. What makes it quietly extraordinary is that it continues to erode toward the Atlantic while those buried within it, adults and children alike, wait.

When inspectors visited in August 1984, the burial ground measured roughly 23.8 metres from north-west to south-east and approximately 21.8 metres from north-east to south-west. Drystone walls bounded the north-west and north-east sides; the other edges gave directly onto the cliffs. Even then, the threat from weathering and erosion was formally noted. By the time a detailed survey was completed by researchers Ian Kuijt and Ryan Lash in 2017, around 66 graves had been identified. The best preserved cluster toward the north-east and likely date to after 1900, but the site almost certainly has much older origins. Two worked stones, one a cross and one a possible cross-slab, may be medieval in date, pointing to a history of burial here stretching back perhaps a thousand years. Inishshark itself was fully evacuated in 1960, when its remaining inhabitants were resettled on the mainland, and the graveyard has had no community to tend it since. The Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast project has been monitoring the site since 2008, documenting what remains before the caves beneath it take more.