That sheer scale sets it apart from the more modest ringfort enclosures common across Ireland; something considerably more organised, and more enduring, once took place here.

Local tradition holds that a church once stood within the enclosure, and the site carries the kind of layered ecclesiastical geography that early medieval communities in Ireland favoured: a defined sacred boundary, a place of worship at its centre, and the dead buried close by. The old graveyard within the enclosure was recorded on the 1841 to 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, but had disappeared from the revised edition of 1897, suggesting either that it had fallen so thoroughly out of use by then as to be unrecognisable, or that its physical traces had been absorbed back into the land. Then in 1987, excavation work turned up a souterrain containing a human skeleton. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement and used variously for storage, refuge, or both; finding one here, with a burial inside, added a more unsettling layer to a site already rich with suggestion. The excavation was published by Cahill in 1988.

The place name Kill itself is worth noting. It derives from the Irish cill, meaning a church or monastic cell, a word that appears in placenames across Ireland wherever early Christian foundations once existed. At this particular Kill, the physical evidence and the name reinforce one another quietly, even as much of what stood here has long since vanished from the surface.