It is an unassuming patch of ground, now beside an abandoned keeper's house, but its presence quietly reframes everything else in the burial ground around it. Mass graves and famine plots like this one were the unglamorous consequence of the Great Famine of the 1840s, when death outpaced the capacity for individual burial, and communal plots became the only practical response.

The graveyard at Abbeystrowry takes its name from the medieval church whose ruins still stand near the western end of the enclosure. The site has the oblong shape typical of early ecclesiastical foundations in Ireland, though it was extended eastward during the nineteenth century, presumably to accommodate the pressure of a growing local population and, not long after, the losses of the Famine years. Among the headstones, which are largely from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are also chest tombs, the box-like raised structures common in Irish and British burial grounds of that period. The ruined church beside which all of this accumulated is the oldest visible layer, a reminder that this ground was considered sacred long before the Famine made it something more complicated.

The famine plot sits in the south-west quadrant, adjacent to what was once a keeper's house and is now abandoned. That adjacency, a mass burial ground beside a derelict building, gives the corner of the graveyard a particular atmosphere of accumulated neglect, though the plot itself is documented and its location known. Abbeystrowry is situated on the estuary of the Ilen river, which places it within the landscape around Skibbereen, a town whose name became almost synonymous internationally with Famine suffering during the 1840s.