Yet the enclosure at Bawnatemple, on a south-facing slope just below the River Lee, measures something in the region of 210 metres north to south and 280 metres east to west, a scale that belongs to the tradition of early Irish monastic enclosures rather than anything more recent. The boundary itself is a layered thing: the earthen field fence along the eastern and south-western arc sits on top of an older earthen bank, still standing to about 1.4 metres in places, while the stone wall to the north-west is built in places directly onto rock outcrop, as though the builders were making use of whatever the ground offered.

At the centre of the enclosure, just north of the road, sits a rectangular graveyard that preserves the site of the ancient parish church of Cannaway and a later Church of Ireland building. Around it the archaeological layers accumulate quietly. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval settlement, has been recorded in the south-western quadrant. A cross-inscribed stone was found in the north-western part of the graveyard. Roughly ninety metres west of the enclosure, a bullaun stone has been noted; bullauns are boulders or bedrock surfaces with one or more cup-shaped hollows, found widely across early Christian sites in Ireland and often associated with ritual or penitential use. The site has a popular association with St Brendan the Navigator, though researchers Hurley and O'Flaherty, writing in 1981, described that connection as extremely tenuous. What they found less ambiguous was the site's early ecclesiastical character, even if the earliest firm documentary reference they could trace was a decretal letter issued by Pope Innocent III in 1199, itself already naming an established place rather than a new one.

The interior of the enclosure slopes gently downward from north to south, with pasture and rock outcroppings to the north-west of the road and open pasture to the south-east. A copse of trees occupies the north-eastern quadrant. The road that bisects the site today follows a line that in some sense mirrors the enclosure's own layered history, cutting through a space that has been accumulating significance, and then being quietly forgotten, for well over a thousand years.