The enclosure measures roughly 37 metres east to west and 34 metres north to south, and is defined by a scarp, an earthen slope or bank, standing between 0.6 and 1.2 metres high along its southern arc. Beyond that, a terrace roughly 2.8 metres wide runs from the south around to the west-northwest, backed by a second outer scarp nearly a metre high. The result is a subtly layered earthwork, the kind that asks you to read the ground rather than look up at a wall. A gap in the scarp at the south-southeast may mark an original entrance, and the interior rises slightly toward its centre, where the opening to a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage of the kind associated with early medieval sites, lies just northwest of the midpoint.

The site appears on Robinson's 1977 map under the name 'Rath boirne', linking it to the Rathborney River that runs to its north. By 1901, the antiquarian T. J. Westropp noted it was already much damaged by burial activity, a process that has continued as the attached graveyard expanded over and around it. The question of what it originally was has not been fully settled. Swinfen, writing in 1992, raised the possibility that it began as a secular enclosure, a rath perhaps, predating the church and graveyard that now surround it. Swan, however, catalogued it in 1991 as an ecclesiastical site, pointing to the substantial evidence for a formal enclosure. The presence of a bullaun stone just outside to the east-southeast lends weight to that interpretation. Bullaun stones, boulders with one or more circular hollows ground into their surface, are strongly associated with early Christian sites in Ireland, where they were used in ritual or practical contexts connected with religious activity. The church itself stands immediately to the northeast, completing a cluster of features that, taken together, suggest continuity of sacred use across many centuries.