Most early ecclesiastical enclosures in Ireland follow a roughly circular or oval plan, reflecting the curved boundaries of an older sacred precinct. The one at Killarida, on low-lying land in north Kerry, is triangular, a 54-metre-long wedge of earthworks that already suggests a site interrupted and reorganised by later activity. A fieldbank running in a north-east to south-west direction has cut clean through the western side, and beyond that bank there is no surface trace of whatever once continued there. The enclosure has, in effect, been amputated.

What survives is an inner triangular area enclosed by an earthen bank, with gaps at various points along its length, reaching roughly a metre in internal height and about two metres wide at the base. Beyond the inner enclosure, a more complex arrangement of outer earthen ridges curves and runs to the south and south-west, suggesting this was once a site of some layered complexity, possibly with multiple phases of construction or use. In the north-east sector, the ground rises into what appear to be the incomplete foundations of a church, oriented east to west as early Christian churches typically were, with a roughly rectangular projection jutting out about 12 metres from the eastern end. The wall width of around 1.1 metres is consistent with early medieval stonework, though no full measurements could be obtained. The site does not appear on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842, but by 1939 it had been recorded, marked simply as "Kyle Burial Ground (site of)". The word kyle derives from the Irish coill, meaning wood or grove, a name that quietly hints at a landscape very different from the open fields that surround the earthworks today.