The burial ground lies adjacent to the Deserted Village of Slievemore, a long street of some eighty roofless stone cottages that was gradually abandoned over the course of the nineteenth century, most likely in the decades surrounding the Great Famine of the 1840s. The combination of the empty village and the graveyard beside the mountain gives the place an atmosphere that is difficult to manufacture and impossible to ignore.

The Deserted Village and its associated graveyard represent a layered history stretching back well before the Famine. The settlement at Slievemore is thought to have much older origins, and the graveyard itself contains early grave markers, some of considerable age, reflecting continuous use of the site across many centuries. Achill Island was among the poorest and most remote parts of the west of Ireland during the nineteenth century, and the community that once lived in the stone cottages below the mountain would have buried their dead here across generations. The practice of "booleying", a seasonal form of transhumance in which farming families moved their cattle to upland pastures in summer, also shaped the settlement pattern at Slievemore; some families continued to use the village intermittently as a summer residence long after it had ceased to function as a permanent home.

The graveyard is accessible on foot from the road that runs along the north of Achill Island toward Keem Bay. The Deserted Village itself is well signposted, and the burial ground lies close by. Visitors should be aware that this is an active graveyard and that some sections contain both very old and relatively recent burials. The mountain behind the site can draw low cloud quickly, and the atmosphere of the place shifts considerably depending on the weather and the light.