Rather than marking a modern or medieval property line, the wall appears to preserve the outline of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that defined monastic and early Christian church sites across Ireland from roughly the sixth century onwards. These enclosures typically demarcated sacred space, often surviving for centuries not as upstanding monuments but as subtle imprints absorbed into later field boundaries, roads, and graveyards.

The enclosure at Kilcumny was first identified by Swan in 1988, who noted that the irregular oval form of the graveyard's boundary wall carried the hallmarks of this earlier, ecclesiastical origin. The site did not end there. An aerial photograph taken by Digital Globe in November 2011 revealed a possible cropmark of a circular enclosure in the fields to the east and south of the graveyard. Cropmarks appear when buried features such as ditches or banks affect the growth of surface vegetation differently from the surrounding soil, becoming legible from above, particularly in dry conditions. If the cropmark does represent a related enclosure, it would suggest the original sacred complex extended considerably beyond the graveyard's present walls.