The Feiritéar — Anglicized as Ferriter — were Cambro-Norman settlers who took root on the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula not long after the Norman conquest of Ireland. By the late 13th century they held a lease on the Blaskets from the Earls of Desmond, and later from the Boyle Earls of Cork. The yearly rent of two hawks reflects what the islands could offer: rough pasture, seabird cliffs, fish in the surrounding sea, and not much else. The Ferriters built their small castle on the point at Rinn an Chaisleáin, which simply means "point of the castle" in Irish. The family produced one of the great Gaelic poets of the 17th century, Piaras Feiritéar, who was hanged in Killarney in 1653 during the Cromwellian conquest.

In 1840, during a period when Protestant missionary societies were active in Catholic Ireland, a small school was built at Rinn an Chaisleáin using stones taken from the ruined Ferriter castle. The name that has stuck to such places — "soup school" — captures what they offered: free food, sometimes literally a meal of soup, in exchange for children attending Protestant religious instruction. The Great Famine (1845–1852) made the offer brutally hard to refuse. Some Catholic families accepted; many did not, and the practice generated lasting bitterness. The Blasket soup school closed in 1852, the same year the Famine officially ended. The stones had been dismantled twice now — once from a castle, once from a school — and the site moved on to its next purpose.

Every Blasket Islander traced ancestry to the mainland villages of Dunquin or Ventry, and tradition demanded burial there, in consecrated ground with the family. But the sea did not always cooperate. When a death came during weeks of bad weather — and weeks of bad weather were not rare — corpses could not be carried across the Blasket Sound. They were kept on the island, sometimes for many days, while families waited for a break in the swell. When the wait grew too long, when waiting became impossible, the body was buried at Rinn an Chaisleáin, on this point of land that had once held a castle and once held a school. The site became a calluragh — unconsecrated burial ground. It received the people who could not be taken home: unbaptized infants, people who died by their own hand, sailors washed up from shipwrecks.

Some of the graves at Rinn an Chaisleáin are marked by stones — undressed slabs, slightly tilted, weather-worn. The dead here represent the categories of human suffering that medieval and early modern Catholic practice could not always accommodate within consecrated ground: the very young, the despairing, the foreign drowned. They were given what the islanders could give them, which was a place on the headland, near the harbour, within sight of home. The community took care of its own this way for centuries. When the last twenty-two Blasket Islanders were taken off the island in 1953, that practice ended too. The stones remain. The names are mostly lost. The headland keeps the dead it was given, in the place where a castle once was.