The wall's quadrantal form, meaning it curves in the rounded, roughly circular or oval shape associated with early medieval religious sites, has led researchers to suspect that a much earlier ecclesiastical enclosure once stood here. These enclosures, typically defined by a bank or ditch marking out sacred ground around an early Irish church or monastery, are often detectable centuries later only through the subtle geometry they leave behind in field boundaries, roads, and, as here, graveyard walls.

The observation was made by Leo Swan, whose 1988 survey work drew attention to the graveyard's curving boundary as a possible trace of such an enclosure. Swan was a pioneering figure in the study of early Christian settlement patterns in Ireland, and his method of reading ecclesiastical enclosures from aerial photographs and landscape features brought dozens of previously unrecognised sites to light. At Castlelost, the evidence is tentative rather than confirmed, a possibility embedded in the shape of a wall rather than anything excavated or conclusively proven. The site sits within a wider Westmeath landscape that retains numerous traces of early medieval activity, though the specific history of this particular enclosure, including any church or community it may once have served, remains largely unknown.