The enclosure measures roughly 48 metres by 42 metres, its bank still standing to a height of around a metre and a half on its outer face. What makes this place quietly unsettling is not its age, though that is considerable, but its later purpose: after the church fell out of use, the ground within the enclosure became, by local tradition, a burial place reserved almost exclusively for drowned mariners.

The enclosure itself is an early ecclesiastical type, a form in which an earthen bank, sometimes accompanied by an outer fosse or ditch, defined the sacred boundary of a monastic or church site. Here the western side of the bank retained traces of an original stone facing, and excavation found that a shallow outer fosse once ran along that same side. The church and a late medieval house within the enclosure were eventually abandoned, and it was only after that point that the ground began to receive the dead from the sea. Carnsore Point, a few miles to the south, was notorious for wrecks, and local knowledge connects several named vessels to burials here. The brig "William" of Weymouth, lost in 1818, has the only surviving headstone. The "Ceres" went down in 1866, the "Langdale" in 1879, and the "Sem", a Hungarian vessel, was wrecked in 1884. Excavation recovered seventeen burials in the northern part of the enclosure and a further ten, mostly infants, inside the church walls. One adult burial within the church is thought to pre-date the earliest structure on the site, a reminder that the ground was in use long before anyone thought to build on it.

The enclosure bank today also serves as the townland boundary between the local townland and Nethertown, so the earthwork carries a double function, sacred margin and administrative line, that it may have held for centuries. Old farm buildings press against the south-east perimeter and a farm track clips the eastern side, obscuring what may once have been the original entrance. The single headstone of the "William" of Weymouth remains the most legible trace of the mariners said to lie here.