The feature is rectangular in plan, roughly ten metres east to west and about one and a half metres wide, with the bank surviving along the south, west, and north edges. It sits prominently in a fertile valley, which gives it a visibility that seems deliberate, as though whoever built or used this place wanted it seen across the surrounding land.

What makes the site quietly complicated is that its identity has not been settled. Carey, writing in 2008, described the whole feature not as a church at all but as an oval cairn, a roughly circular mound of stones, measuring up to eighteen metres east to west, with a large oval-shaped depression at its centre. Both readings may have some truth to them; early ecclesiastical enclosures were sometimes cut into or built upon earlier prehistoric monuments, and the landscape around Gortaclare is old enough to make that kind of layering plausible. Large unworked boulders dumped inside the eastern end of the enclosure complicate matters further, though these appear to be the result of relatively recent field clearance rather than any original construction. A short distance to the north-east, roughly three metres away, a few flat stones lying on the ground may mark the edge of a children's burial ground recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps. Such burial grounds, sometimes called cillíní, were used in Ireland for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, and they were frequently placed near old church sites or boundary locations that carried a lingering sense of sanctity.