The graves are marked not with carved stone but with rough planking, shallow lidless boxes half-filled with sawdust, and the occasional simple wooden cross. Broken black bottles lie wedged between slab-like stones. Ancient ash trees, their trunks centuries old, spread interlacing branches overhead. It looks, as one early twentieth-century visitor put it, rather more like the back-yard of a country grocer's shop than a place of burial.

The writer John Harris Stone visited the site and described it in his 1906 travel guide, 'Connemara and the neighbouring spots of beauty and interest', and what caught his attention above everything else was the funerary custom associated with interments here, one he noted was famous well beyond the west of Ireland. With each corpse, a box of short clay pipes was brought to the graveside. After the earth had been filled in and a mound of stones raised, every mourner received a pipe and tobacco. They smoked together, knocked their ash onto the freshly covered grave, then broke the pipes or left them behind. The small sawdust-filled boxes Stone photographed were the remnants of pipe-boxes from earlier funerals. The custom's origin was unknown even then, though Stone observed it made an uncommonly direct emblem of ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The corpse was also carried three times around the cemetery before burial, borne only by close relations, preferably those sharing the same surname. Within the graveyard there was also a holy well, known as Tobersalrock, though by Stone's time it had already been filled up with rubbish, and the site of an earlier church; no visible remains of either survive today. Two ash trees growing unusually close together were said by local tradition to mark the graves of two lovers who never married but died on the same day, their trees in death leaning into one another as the couple never could in life.