High crosses, those tall carved stone monuments that served as focal points for prayer, preaching, and commemoration in early medieval Ireland, are not the kind of thing that appear in clusters by accident. Their presence here marks this as the site of a significant early monastery, one that has since receded into the quieter form of a rural churchyard overlooking the River Suir valley.

In 1985, an archaeological excavation in the northern sector of the graveyard brought something unexpected to light. Beneath the soil, a wall was uncovered, running east to west in a gradually curving arc, between 1.5 and 2 metres wide and surviving to a height of only 0.2 to 0.9 metres, just one or two courses of stone. It was built in dry-stone technique, faced on both its inner and outer surfaces, with the core packed with rubble and large boulders. This kind of curved perimeter wall is characteristic of an ecclesiastical enclosure, the boundary that would have defined the sacred precinct of an early Irish monastic site. What complicated the picture, however, was the geology beneath. The wall appeared to sit on boulder clay that lay at a higher level than the clay inside the enclosure, suggesting the wall may have been built on a natural terrace or a pre-existing earthen bank. The excavation, published by Hurley in 1988, could not resolve whether this structure dated to the monastery's early medieval phase or was a later medieval addition, leaving the question of its origins genuinely open.