The combination is not accidental. Across early medieval Ireland, small religious communities defined their sacred space with a roughly circular bank and ditch, and what survives at Newtown Upper appears to be exactly that kind of enclosure, reduced now to grass and pastureland, but still legible in the landscape if you know what you are looking for.

The Ordnance Survey Letters, those nineteenth-century field notes compiled by antiquarians travelling the country on behalf of the Survey, recorded a circular bank with an internal diameter of around 21 metres and an external fosse, the term for the ditch dug outside such a bank, often used to define and defend a boundary. Inside that perimeter sat a church and a children's burial ground, the latter a cillín, the kind of unconsecrated ground where unbaptised infants were traditionally interred outside the formal rites of the Church. Scholars including Healy and Ua Broin have suggested the site represents an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the type of foundation that predates the formal parish system and often marks the earliest phase of Christian organisation in an area. The record was compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, with a revised entry dated July 2018.

The site sits in working pastureland, so access will depend on the landowner, and there is no formal path or signage to guide a visitor. The enclosure is best appreciated from the field edge, where the slight rise of the bank may still be visible against the slope. The valley and its stream below give some sense of why an early community might have settled here, water being a practical necessity as much as a symbolic one for early monastic sites. Coming in late winter or early spring, before the grass grows too thickly, tends to make earthwork features like this easier to read from ground level.