An aerial photograph taken in 1986 caught it: a curving arc in the field to the north of the graveyard, visible only as a shadow mark in the crop, tracing the outline of what appears to have been a substantial enclosure surrounding the whole ecclesiastical site. On the ground, it has been entirely levelled. The enclosure is gone, but its ghost remains readable from the air.

Ecclesiastical enclosures of this kind, roughly circular or oval boundaries that once defined the sacred precinct of an early Irish church, were common features of the early medieval landscape, though most have been lost to centuries of agriculture and development. What makes Desert slightly more specific is a detail recorded by Power in 1923: to the east of the graveyard, running through what was then bogland, lay the remains of an ancient causeway known as the Cliadh Buidhe, described as leading to the church. A causeway of this sort, built to give dry passage across soft or waterlogged ground, suggests the site was once approached quite deliberately across difficult terrain, which implies it mattered enough to people to make the effort. That bogland is now forested, and whatever physical trace of the Cliadh Buidhe remained in 1923 is likely buried or obscured beneath the plantation.