No earthwork breaks the surface, no stones protrude, and no historic document names a church or religious community here. What prompted anyone to look in the first place was a combination of quieter evidence: a bullaun stone, a cross slab, and word from the landowner that human bones and shell middens had turned up in one corner of the field.

A bullaun is a boulder or rock with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into it, commonly associated in Ireland with early Christian sites and sometimes used for grinding or ritual purposes. The cross slab is a flat stone bearing an incised cross, another typical marker of early ecclesiastical activity. These two objects, along with the burial reports, were enough to draw researchers Sheehan and Moore to the site in 1981. What they found was a poorly preserved oval enclosure, roughly 130 metres east to west and 95 metres north to south, its outline pieced together from fragments: an earthen bank averaging about a metre in height along part of the circuit, a tree line continuing it further, an old road forming one side, and a modern field boundary closing off the remainder. In the north-western sector, a raised circular area roughly 25 metres across marked the spot where the cross slab and bullaun sat, and where the landowner had located the finds of human remains. Sheehan and Moore interpreted the whole assemblage as the possible remains of an early monastic enclosure, and suggested it may have been abandoned following the reorganisation of the Irish church in the mid-twelfth century, a period when many smaller, locally patronised monasteries lost their standing as ecclesiastical power was consolidated and restructured. A return visit in 1999, however, found no surface trace of the enclosure at all, leaving the bullaun and the cross slab as the only tangible signs that something was once here.