There is no visible wall, no obvious boundary, yet the ground around Teampall Chiaráin may still carry the memory of one in subtler forms.

In 1980, Robinson recorded what appeared to be traces of a cashel, a roughly circular stone enclosure of the kind typically built to demarcate early Christian monastic settlements, around the church. When the site was inspected more closely in 1984, however, no physical evidence of such a structure could be found. What survives instead are two possible indicators of where the monastery's boundary once ran. A curving boreen to the north-east of the church follows a line that may echo the arc of a long-vanished enclosure wall, its curve preserving in a country lane what stone no longer does. Further out, to the north-east and east-north-east of the church, stand two cross-inscribed pillars. As early as 1927, O'Flanagan proposed that these might be termon crosses, the markers used in early medieval Ireland to define the sacred boundary, or termon, of a monastic site, a zone that also carried legal protections for those who sought sanctuary within it. If that identification is correct, the pillars would not merely be decorative; they would represent the outermost edge of what was once a functioning monastic territory.

The site rewards close attention rather than a quick glance. The relationship between the boreen's curve, the church itself, and the two inscribed pillars becomes more legible when you walk the ground between them, tracing in the landscape what the archaeology can no longer confirm in stone.