That gentle arc is not accidental. It follows the line of a much older enclosure, one that formed the outer boundary of a monastery known in Irish as Cill Mhic Naomháin, a name meaning roughly "the church of the son of the saint." The site consists of a large sub-circular earthen bank, roughly 75 metres north to south and 80 metres east to west, enclosing a church, a graveyard, and a high cross in its south-eastern quadrant. At the centre of all this sits a smaller, semi-circular enclosure about 20 metres across, its low earthen bank now very poorly preserved. Beyond the main enclosure, further banks extend outward, and aerial photography taken in November 2011 suggests the full complex of earthworks may cover as much as 8 hectares. The visible remains, in other words, are only a portion of something considerably larger.

The curved graveyard wall was first noted as evidence of an earlier enclosure by Swan in 1988. The folklore collected between 1937 and 1939 as part of the Irish Schools' Collection adds another layer. Local people told schoolchildren at the time that there had once been a town on the site of the graveyard, with a monastery at its centre, the ruins of which were still visible in one corner. The same collection recorded a 17th-century mass burial pit somewhere in a field beside the graveyard, marked by what was described simply as a "big bush." Every funeral procession entering the graveyard was expected to circle this bush three times while the priest recited the De Profundis, the penitential psalm traditionally associated with prayers for the dead. That custom continued until around 1918, when the local priest brought it to an end. The bush itself has never been definitively located, and the burial pit remains unidentified.