There is no monument, no inscription, and little to alert a passing visitor that the uneven ground underfoot may hold the remains of people who died during the Great Famine of the 1840s.

The site sits in low, wet land sheltered to the north by a steep ridge, the kind of marginal terrain that was often used for hasty or informal burial during times of crisis. The Great Famine, which struck Ireland with particular force between 1845 and 1852 following the repeated failure of the potato crop, killed approximately one million people and drove at least another million to emigrate. In many rural communities, the dead were buried quickly and close to where they fell, sometimes in unconsecrated ground or in plots that existed outside the formal parish record. Such places were often remembered only through oral tradition, passed from one generation to the next, which is exactly the kind of local information that appears to have preserved the memory of this site. The few mounds that survive at Lurgan offer no firm archaeological confirmation of what lies beneath, but neither do they contradict what local people have long held to be true.