But look at the way its eastern wall curves slightly as it runs, and you are, without quite realising it, following the ghost of something much older and considerably larger. The graveyard wall is not simply following the logic of the field; it is tracing the arc of an early ecclesiastical enclosure that once ringed the entire site, an enclosure roughly eighty metres across on its north-east to south-west axis.

The fuller shape of this vanished boundary only became apparent from the air. Aerial reconnaissance carried out in July 1970 caught a curving cropmark just outside the southern graveyard wall, a faint differential in the growth of the field surface that the ground gives up to an overhead camera in a way it rarely does to a person walking across it. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried or ploughed-out features, such as the remains of a bank or ditch, influence how overlying vegetation grows, particularly in dry summers when stressed crops reveal what lies beneath. Here, the cropmark appears to continue the same curve already preserved in that distinctive section of the graveyard's eastern wall, suggesting the two are fragments of a single original boundary. On the ground itself, what survives is minimal: faint traces of a bank, between nine and twelve metres wide, heavily reduced by centuries of ploughing. Ecclesiastical enclosures of this type are associated with early Irish Christian settlements, where a roughly circular or oval boundary, sometimes called a ráith or caiseal depending on its construction, defined sacred space around a church and its associated buildings. The church the enclosure once circled still stands nearby. Adding further texture to the site, a holy well and a structure recorded as a Sweat Kiln lie approximately a hundred metres to the east. Sweat kilns, sometimes known as teach alluis, were small stone structures associated with ritual sweating or purification and are occasionally found in proximity to early religious sites.