The knoll itself is called Cnocán na mBan, meaning the little hill of the women, and the field directly across the road goes by Fearann na gCeann, the field of the heads. These are not decorative names.

Local tradition holds that members of the O'Brien family once slaughtered each other here, very nearly to the point of extinction, while their womenfolk watched from the knoll. The field to the north earned its name from skulls reportedly dug up there, a detail noted by the writer Tim Robinson in 1980. The graveyard itself was recorded on the 1899 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a roughly D-shaped, unenclosed area of around twenty metres across. It has since been enclosed by a concrete wall. Modern burials occupy the western end, but the eastern part holds a dense cluster of small, plain gravestones, and among them stands a modest upright cross-slab, the kind of early marker that appears at many early medieval Irish burial sites, cut from stone with little ornamentation and set directly into the earth.

The cross-slab and the older gravestones at the eastern end are easy to overlook if you approach from the modern burial ground side. The knoll sits on the southern edge of the road close to the harbour at Port Mhuirbhigh, and the names of the surrounding fields, Cnocán na mBan and Fearann na gCeann, are worth holding in mind as you look across to the ground opposite, now an ordinary patch of farmland with nothing visible to mark what was once reportedly turned up there.