The curving, roughly circular form of the wall suggests the site once functioned as an ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that defined the sacred precinct of an early Irish monastic or church settlement. These enclosures, common across Ireland from the early medieval period, typically marked off a zone of sanctuary and spiritual activity, and their distinctive rounded shape often survives long after the original community has disappeared, absorbed into later land divisions or, as here, into the walls of a working graveyard.

The identification was made by Swan in 1988, who noted that the quadrantal, or quarter-circle, form of the graveyard's boundary wall pointed to the likely presence of such an enclosure beneath or around the existing site. The logic is straightforward: later rectangular field boundaries and graveyard walls were frequently laid out to follow, or partially follow, the arc of an earlier circular enclosure, leaving a curved segment visible in an otherwise rectilinear landscape. Kilmaglish, with its telling wall geometry, fits this pattern. The name itself, derived from the Irish, likely incorporates a reference to a church or ecclesiastical place, lending some additional weight to the interpretation.