The island measures roughly 50 metres north to south and 215 metres east to west, with boggy, low-lying ground to the north and somewhat higher, fertile land to the south. There are no headstones, no markers of any kind. The dead here are known only by their bones, which, by the time the historian William Carrigan was writing in 1905, were already protruding from the eroding riverbank, waiting, as he put it, for the next winter's flood to carry them off.

The island's origin as a burial place traces back to an anchorite, a Christian hermit who withdrew from the world to live in solitary prayer, typically in a cell attached to a church or, in this case, on a natural island in a river. After the anchorite's death, the island became a popular burial ground, its sanctity rooted in that earlier holy occupation. The place is properly called Anker's Island, a name that preserves the memory of its inhabitant, "anker" being a form of the word anchorite. Carrigan noted with some frustration that Ordnance Survey maps had rendered it as Archer's Island, mistaking or misreading the older name entirely. By Carrigan's time, burials had almost certainly ceased for many centuries, and the river had already swept away a considerable portion of the graveyard. The southern channel of the river has since been filled in and the land reclaimed, so what was once an island is now physically connected to the surrounding terrain, though the ground on either side remains wet and very low lying.