Measured at roughly 46 metres across in each direction, the rise is defined by a grass-covered bank no more than 0.6 metres high on its outer face, and considerably less on the inside. It is easy to miss from ground level. But plough the field, and the earth offers something more: a concentration of slate-like stones emerging along the line of that bank, suggesting something deliberately placed, long ago compacted beneath the turf.

A local observer named Bowman recorded the feature in 1934, describing a raised area some 55 yards in diameter sitting about two feet above the surrounding field level. That modest elevation has since proved significant. At the centre of the enclosure lies a burial ground and the site of a church, the kind of small ecclesiastical complex that appears across early medieval Ireland, often enclosed within a roughly circular bank or fosse. A fosse, in this context, is a ditch dug as a boundary marker, sometimes with the excavated material piled into an accompanying bank. What makes Gortageen particularly interesting is that an aerial photograph taken in July 1975 revealed a cropmark, a pattern visible in growing vegetation when buried features affect moisture and nutrients in the soil, outlining a roughly square enclosure of around 50 metres on each side, surrounding the church site and graveyard. The shift in shape, from the subcircular raised bank visible on the ground to the more angular form suggested by the cropmark, hints at a site with a complicated history, perhaps modified across multiple phases of use.