The ditches themselves are invisible now, but test trenching carried out in June 2014, ahead of a proposed extension to the graveyard at Killuran, brought them back into focus. What the excavation revealed was a double-ditched enclosure surrounding the site of the original church, with an internal diameter of roughly 80 metres and ditches that were steep-sided, nearly a metre deep and up to 2.7 metres wide. These are not incidental features. They are the defining boundary of an early medieval ecclesiastical site, the kind of enclosure that would have separated sacred ground from the secular world outside it, marking the church and its immediate surroundings as a distinct and protected space.

The 2014 work by Taylor and Hull built on earlier geophysical survey and desk-based assessment, all of which pointed to the same conclusion: that the enclosure is probably early medieval in date, placing its origins somewhere in the broad period between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Within the enclosure, the trenches also turned up smaller gullies, pits, and post-holes, the kinds of features that suggest sustained activity over time, structures built and rebuilt, ground broken for purposes that are now difficult to interpret precisely. One object, however, needs no excavation to find. A bullaun stone sits within the graveyard itself. Bullaun stones are boulders or rocks with one or more artificial cup-shaped depressions ground into them; their exact purpose is debated, but they appear frequently at early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland and are generally understood to have had ritual or devotional significance.

The graveyard at Killuran remains in use, and the bullaun stone is accessible within it. The double-ditched enclosure, for its part, is not visible above ground, but knowing it is there changes how the place reads: the circular logic of a boundary drawn perhaps fifteen centuries ago, still loosely traced by the shape of a graveyard that has never quite moved beyond it.