Known locally as Reilig Fhínse, it belongs to a category of burial ground found across Ireland sometimes called a cillín, a place set apart from consecrated ground for those excluded from formal Church burial, most commonly unbaptised infants, but also the unbaptised generally, suicides, shipwrecked strangers, and others who fell outside the boundaries of parish life. What makes this particular site quietly unsettling is not just its marginality in life and record, but its physical precariousness: the Atlantic has been eating into it, and bones have on occasion been washed out onto the boulder beach immediately to the west.

When the site was first recorded in August 1984, surveyors found only a scatter of small set stones and faint traces of an earthen bank that may once have marked the western boundary. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map had classified it as a children's burial ground, though the second edition of 1899 dropped that designation and listed it simply as a burial ground. The writer Tim Robinson, in his 1985 account of the Connemara islands, recorded a local tradition that one of the first settlers on Fínis, a woman of the Mac Donnchas family, was buried here. By the time of a revisit in April 2014, prompted by reports of storm damage to the island, little more than a handful of set stones remained, concentrated in the north-west corner, with the rest of the interior showing only uneven ground, bumps and hollows where graves once lay. The western edge of the site continues to erode with each significant storm.