It measures roughly six metres by four, and to most eyes would read as nothing more than a slight rise in the pasture. But beneath that oblong hump lie the foundations of a structure whose walls, when they still stood at the south-west angle, reached perhaps a metre or two above ground. The site carries a particular weight beyond its modest dimensions: the ground here was used for the burial of unbaptised children, placing it among a category of liminal, unconsecrated spaces that appear across Ireland under various local names, often on the margins of parishes and histories alike.

The Ordnance Survey Letters, that remarkable nineteenth-century record of Irish antiquities compiled by travelling scholars, noted the church remains at Newtown Upper, a reference later drawn on by Michael Herity in his 2001 survey of the area. The church itself is encircled by a circular earthen bank and an external fosse, meaning a ditch dug around the perimeter, with an internal diameter of around twenty-one metres. This combination of bank and fosse is characteristic of early ecclesiastical enclosures in Ireland, the kind of boundary that would have defined a sacred precinct in the early medieval period, separating the spiritual space within from the ordinary world beyond. Scholars including Healy and Ua Broin have suggested the earthwork may indeed represent the remains of just such an enclosure, pointing to an origin considerably older than any standing masonry might suggest.

The site sits in pastureland, so access will depend on land ownership and the usual courtesies of the Irish countryside. The mound itself, being so modest, is easy to miss without some foreknowledge of what you are looking for; the circular bank around it is arguably the more legible feature from ground level, best appreciated by walking its circumference and noticing how the ground rises and falls in a deliberate arc. The stream visible below the valley brow would have made this a practical as well as a spiritually significant location, water being a common companion to early religious sites. There are no facilities, no signage, and nothing to announce the place as anything other than a field.