It was not discovered through excavation or local tradition but from the air: two widely spaced curving cropmarks, visible on an aerial photograph taken in August 1996, traced the arc of what appears to have been a substantial circular or oval enclosure. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried ditches or banks affect the growth of surface vegetation differently from undisturbed ground, making buried features readable from above even when nothing remains visible at ground level. The enclosure they revealed is bivallate, meaning it was defined by two concentric boundaries, a form associated in Ireland with sites of considerable status or antiquity.

The place-name gives the deeper context. The earlier Irish name for the settlement was Ceall Uachta Lawyne or Lamund, meaning roughly 'the upper church, or small church, in the territory of Lamund,' according to research by Paul Stevens in 2001. That ecclesiastical reference points to an origin in the Early Christian period, and the enclosure may well have surrounded a church or monastic site, though nothing survives above ground to confirm it. Archaeological testing in the north-east quadrant of the enclosure uncovered a shallow ditch 1.6 metres wide and 0.35 metres deep, along with a residual bank and what were described as interior occupation deposits, the kind of evidence consistent with a settlement or religious community of some kind. The south-eastern portion of the enclosure has been built over by the Sue Ryder complex and a school playing field, and is likely destroyed in those areas. The only portion still faintly legible on the surface lies to the east and east-south-east, where a broad, heavily ploughed-down bank stretches to 23 metres in width, rising just 0.82 metres above the exterior ground level. A separate excavation carried out by Paul Stevens in 2000 at the nearby disused nineteenth-century Church of Ireland building, which sits immediately to the west, found no archaeological features beneath it.