A D-shaped enclosure, roughly 200 metres east to west and 130 metres north to south, wraps around an oval graveyard and a Church of Ireland church. It does not announce itself as a wall or a ditch you can easily trace on foot; instead, it appears as cropmark features, those telltale variations in vegetation that show up from the air when buried or levelled earthworks influence how plants grow above them. The enclosure backs onto a small stream to the south, and the whole complex sits on a slight rise above its northern bank, a positioning that would have made practical and symbolic sense to whoever chose it.

According to the nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan, writing around 1840, the site began as an early monastic foundation established by a St Colman in the seventh century. The ecclesiastical enclosure, a boundary defining the sacred precinct of an early Irish monastery, was a standard feature of such foundations across the country, though they vary considerably in shape and scale. Here the D-shape, with the flat side resting against the stream, is a fairly characteristic arrangement that exploited natural boundaries as part of the monastic perimeter. Within that outer enclosure, the oval graveyard is itself a typical early medieval form, pre-dating the rectilinear churchyards that became common in later centuries. A church recorded within the graveyard, now sharing the space with the later Church of Ireland building, points to long continuity of use on the site, from the seventh century through to the present day. The aerial photographs taken in 2006, alongside earlier images, are what make the full extent of the enclosure legible now, revealing a shape the surface landscape no longer clearly shows.