The church ruin sits on a small, slightly raised patch of uncultivated ground in the middle of a working tillage field in County Dublin, with no grave-markers visible on the surface and no obvious enclosing boundary left standing. Yet the ground itself remembers a more substantial arrangement, and it takes either an aerial camera or a dry summer to make it legible again.

A Cambridge University aerial photograph taken on 19 July 1970, held in the CUCAP archive as image BDU047, caught the site at a moment when more was still visible. The church stood on a circular-shaped hillock, partially surrounded by an earth-and-bank boundary running from south to west, with an external fosse, essentially a ditch dug around the outside of an enclosure, defining an oval area roughly 70 metres by 50 metres. A possible inner bank with an opening on the south side was also discernible. The oval earthwork had already been recorded much earlier: it appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch map, where it represents the enclosing element of the graveyard. Archaeologists, including Geraldine Stout who compiled the original record, and Caimin O'Brien who revised it, suggest that this boundary may itself follow the line of an earlier ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval perimeter that defined early medieval Irish church sites and set sacred ground apart from the surrounding landscape. By the time of the 1970 photograph, the boundary had already been partially levelled from west through north to east. It has since been removed almost entirely.

The outline has not vanished completely, however. Aerial orthoimages taken by Digital Globe between 2011 and 2013 show the levelled enclosure reappearing as a cropmark, the differential growth of crops over buried features that reveals, under the right light and at the right time of year, what ground surveys can no longer confirm. A possible field system to the south of the church and graveyard is similarly visible on Google Earth orthoimages. Visiting in person, you are unlikely to see much beyond the isolated ruin and the slight rise of ground beneath it. The most revealing views of Aderrig remain airborne ones.