When the Earl of Dunraven visited Illauntannig, the largest of the Magharee Islands, he found human bones protruding from the eroded face of the enclosure bank where the wall had been undercut and washed out. It is a detail that lodges in the mind, the burial ground asserting itself even as the island works to reclaim it.

The island sits where Brandon Bay and Tralee Bay divide, and the Early Christian monastic settlement it holds is remarkably intact. A cashel, the term for a stone enclosure wall of this kind, rings a complex that includes two small oratories, three beehive huts, and a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used for storage or refuge. Three leachts, which are low rectangular stone platforms associated with prayer or commemoration, also survive within the enclosure, along with a stone cross, three cross-slabs, a bullaun stone (a rock with one or more cup-shaped hollows, often linked to ritual use), a hand-bell, and fragments of five quern-stones used for grinding grain. A second bullaun stone lies roughly a hundred metres to the south, at the very edge of the sea. The burial ground itself occupies the north-west sector of the enclosure, its markers arranged in fairly regular rows, with a few isolated examples scattered elsewhere inside the walls. On the nearby headland of Reennafardarrig, a hut-site, old field walls, and a reputed cross-inscribed boulder may all be connected to the same early settlement, suggesting the monastic presence once extended beyond the island itself.