It looks, at first glance, like a natural rise in the ground. Walk to its eastern edge, though, and the slope drops steeply to the rocky shore, and where erosion has stripped away the turf, the sandy core spills open to reveal something older and stranger: quantities of limpet shells and animal bone, and, at times, human remains. The mound, roughly 30 metres east to west and 32 metres north to south, rising to about two and a half metres at its highest eastern point, has been absorbing the dead and the debris of daily life for a very long time.

By 1838, when the Ordnance Survey mapped the island at six inches to the mile, the site was already marked simply as a burial ground. By the 1921 revised edition it had been re-designated as an ancient burial ground, a quiet acknowledgement that whatever was happening here predated recent memory. A concentration of large stones and slabs near the northern end of the mound may be the remains of a church that appears on both those maps at roughly this location, now mostly sod-covered and hard to read. A carved cross-slab has also been recorded on the mound, a type of early Christian grave marker found at many early medieval burial sites across the west of Ireland. A few low upright slabs protrude from the northern and southern edges, possibly grave markers, though the surface of the mound gives little else away. To the north, a row of upright slabs forms a revetment that appears to be relatively late in date, associated with a ruined 19th-century house just five metres away. The dead and the living were close neighbours here. The ruined stone houses of the island's 18th- to 20th-century village crowd in immediately to the west and north, so that the burial ground sits at the centre of a long human story that ends, for now, in emptiness and Atlantic wind.