What we have is a gap where an enclosure used to be, or was at least reported to be, which is a particular kind of historical puzzle.

When Ordnance Survey officers were compiling their letters in 1838 and 1840, they noted that the remains of a church and what may have been other buildings at this site were enclosed by a feature they called a 'moat'. In Irish ecclesiastical contexts, this term generally refers to a roughly circular earthen boundary, the kind that once defined an early monastic or church precinct rather than any defensive fortification in the conventional sense. Such enclosures are common enough across Ireland, quietly marking out the ground that once belonged to a religious community, often surviving for centuries as low earthen banks or ditches in farmland. By the time O'Flanagan published the Ordnance Survey letters in 1928, the notation was already historical. By 1990, when the site was physically inspected, no trace of the enclosure could be found at all. The church itself is recorded separately; it is the surrounding boundary, that defining ring of earth, that had simply gone.