A drumlin, for the uninitiated, is one of those smooth, elongated hills left behind by retreating glaciers, and early Irish church founders had a habit of choosing their lower flanks for shelter and drainage. The enclosure here measures roughly 37 metres east to west and 32 metres north to south, and its boundary survives only as a slight scarp, between 0.2 and 1.2 metres high, traceable along the north-west to south-west arc. Farm buildings have since encroached on both the western and eastern sides, so the outline is incomplete, but the curve of the ground still carries the shape of something deliberately bounded.

By 1972, when Gannon recorded the site, even the church foundations had effectively vanished. Earlier description placed them as an east-west aligned building set within a rectangular area that may have served as a graveyard, the standard arrangement for a small Irish ecclesiastical enclosure of early medieval origin. Such enclosures, typically oval or roughly circular, defined the sacred precinct around a church and its associated burials, and their form is one of the more persistent traces left by early Christian communities in the Irish landscape. Human burials have been found at Kilcanoran, confirming that whatever stood here, people were interred in this ground, and the place carried the weight that burial confers long after the masonry dissolved into the hillside.