That alone sets it apart: most island burial grounds in Ireland fell out of use long ago, their communities scattered or gone. This one, tucked immediately south-west of the medieval abbey on Canon Island in County Clare, remains an active place of burial, with headstones from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries standing among the older fabric of the site.

The graveyard is roughly subrectangular in shape, measuring approximately 32 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and 36 metres across. Its boundaries are defined in a way that makes the relationship between the living and the historical fabric unusually legible: the abbey building itself forms the north-eastern edge, while the south-western limit follows the overgrown curve of what was once the wider ecclesiastical enclosure, the roughly circular or oval boundary that would originally have marked off the entire monastic precinct as sacred ground. Headstones can be found both within the ruined church and in a chapel to its north, suggesting that burial has shifted and accumulated across different parts of the complex over time rather than being confined to a single designated plot.