The Ordnance Survey mapped it on all editions of their six-inch series, and on both the 1837 and 1887 editions they labelled it a fort. That designation was understandable enough; at roughly 90 metres north to south and 85 metres east to west, the outline is substantial, and earthen enclosures of this kind are commonly associated with ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that dot the Irish countryside from the early medieval period. What the surveyors either did not know or chose not to record was that a church sits within the interior, slightly off-centre to the north-east, marking this instead as an ecclesiastical enclosure of the kind that once defined the boundaries of an early Irish religious site.

Ecclesiastical enclosures served a function that was at once practical and symbolic, marking out consecrated ground and the community gathered around it, often surviving long after the church itself fell out of use or into ruin. At Aghintemple, the enclosure has not survived intact. From the north-west around to the north and east, the boundary has been absorbed into a field boundary, so that what was once a deliberate religious perimeter now doubles as ordinary agricultural division. Elsewhere the earthwork has been levelled almost entirely. Yet the overall outline remains identifiable if you know to look for it, a faint arc in the land that the modern field system has not quite managed to erase.