But the island held people, and lost them, long before that. Beside the ruins of St. Leo's Church, a graveyard occupies ground that turns out, on closer inspection, to be older and stranger than it first appears. When researchers began excavating along the east gable wall and the south-east corner of the church in 2010, they found not just one or two graves but a cluster of carefully placed burials, suggesting that this particular patch of earth was considered especially significant by whoever chose it.

The excavations, led by Kujit and colleagues, identified five grave cuts running along the east gable and at least one more at the south-east corner. The positioning is telling. In early medieval ecclesiastical practice, burial immediately beside the walls of a church, particularly near the east end where the altar stood, was a privilege reserved for those of high standing within a religious community. The researchers concluded that the individuals interred here were likely revered members of that community, people set apart in death as they presumably were in life. St. Leo's Church itself belongs to an early Christian monastic tradition; Inishshark appears to have supported a small religious settlement, and this graveyard seems to preserve a fragment of its inner hierarchy.