The main entrance, a generous five-metre-wide opening to the south-south-west, has been blocked at some point by a rough stone wall, redirecting access to a break in the north-west. Inside, the enclosure is divided down the middle by a further wall running north to south, with a burial ground and a stone cross occupying the eastern half. That internal subdivision alone suggests a site that was organised, ranked, and used across a long span of time.

The enclosure is known locally by the name Kilmacowen, borrowed from the adjoining townland, and was identified as an early ecclesiastical site by the archaeologist Hurley in 1980. The prefix "kil" in Irish place names typically derives from "cill", meaning a monastic cell or small church, which gives some indication of the site's probable origins. What makes the interior particularly interesting is its density. Two rectangular house sites survive as grass-covered wall foundations, one of them built directly into the northern bank of the burial ground. Further west, four circular hut sites, each around 3.3 metres in diameter, cluster just south of a curving earth and stone bank. These small circular structures are characteristic of early medieval Irish monasticism, where individual monks occupied modest cells within a communally enclosed space, called in Irish a "clos" or more familiarly a monastic enclosure. A ruined animal shelter near the blocked entrance, alongside a separate hut foundation, suggests the site also served practical agricultural functions, as many such enclosures did. One further detail stands out: a rectangular stone roughly 0.7 metres long with a deep groove cut at one end, found in the south-east quadrant. A comparable stone was recorded at the early ecclesiastical enclosure at Kilnaruane, not far away on the Bantry peninsula, which raises the possibility that these grooved stones had a specific and shared function, though precisely what that was remains open.