The ditch itself, between two and three and a half metres wide and roughly eighty centimetres deep, is the kind of feature that rarely survives in a legible form, and here it only came to light because an archaeologist happened to be present during the groundworks.

The monastery at Aghagower is traditionally associated with St Patrick, who is said to have established a church on the site in the fifth century, though no physical remains survive from that period. What the 2006 excavation did recover was considerably later but no less informative. The ditch fill, a dense dark-brown soil, contained charcoal, fragments of hazel, blackthorn and ash, a piece of iron slag, and thirty-one fragments of animal bone from cattle, sheep or goat, and pigs. The bones were mostly what archaeologists call meat-poor elements, the parts left over after the best cuts have been taken, along with a cattle horn-core that had been cleanly severed at the base, most likely to extract the horn sheath for use as a material. Radiocarbon dating of one of the bone samples placed the deposit firmly in the early medieval period, between 580 and 661 AD. The two sections of ditch were uncovered roughly thirty metres apart, one near the north-east angle of the graveyard and one midway along its eastern side, but the full circuit of the enclosure, if there was one, remains unknown. The graveyard wall and the modern road between them have, for now, preserved that question underground, alongside whatever else the monastery's precinct might still contain.