In a pasture field above the Finisk River in County Waterford, the ground itself carries faint but legible traces of a religious community that has long since vanished. What survives is the outline of an oval enclosure, roughly 63 metres from north to south and 46 metres from east to west, expressed now only as a scarp along one side and a slight dip along another. Part of the perimeter has been absorbed into a field bank, so the boundary between early medieval sacred space and ordinary agricultural land is quite literally built into the modern landscape.

Oval or sub-circular enclosures of this kind are a characteristic feature of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, often marking out the consecrated ground of a monastic settlement or a small church community from the surrounding secular world. The enclosure at Ballynaguilkee sits on level ground at the top of an east-facing slope, with the Finisk River running roughly north to south about 300 metres to the south-east, a positioning that is typical of early church foundations, which tended to favour elevated, well-drained ground near a reliable water source. The site once held at least one high cross, a form of elaborately carved free-standing stone monument associated with early Christian Ireland, but the base and part of the shaft that Peter Harbison recorded in his 1992 survey of Irish high crosses are now missing, leaving the enclosure without even that partial marker of what it once contained.