The enclosure itself, roughly 40 metres east to west and 35 metres north to south, is defined by earthen banks with stone facing on three sides, and a masonry wall along the road to the west. It is a quiet, low-key site, easily overlooked, yet what it contains suggests a considerably longer and more layered history than its modest remains might imply.

The earliest documentary reference here is to a chapel of Hoel of Karrothobren, mentioned in a charter of Richard Marshal dated 1232 to 1233, where it appears as a boundary marker in the description of the forest of Ross. This places the site firmly within the landscape of Anglo-Norman county Wexford, though the church itself may well have served a parish that had already existed for some time before that. By the seventeenth century, that parish had been absorbed into Adamstown, and later still into Newbawn, leaving Courthoyle Old as one of those places whose administrative identity dissolved quietly over the centuries. Among the most notable objects on the site is a granite bullaun stone, a type of ancient carved boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows, whose uses ranged from grinding to ritual, and which are frequently associated with early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland. This one measures roughly half a metre across and sits beside the cairn. Nearby stands a shale cross nearly two metres tall, with short arms and a wheel-shaped head, the east face bearing a simple incised cross at its slightly raised centre. The cross is a substantial piece of work for a site that has otherwise left so little above ground.