It is not much to look at now, but the shape itself is the point. Ecclesiastical enclosures of this subcircular form, typically defined by a bank and an external fosse or ditch, are characteristic of early medieval Irish monastic foundations, where the boundary carried ritual as well as practical significance. This one measures roughly 79 metres east to west and 75 metres north to south, and a narrow boreen cuts straight through it at both the north and south, indifferent to what it is bisecting.

The site is thought to have begun as an early monastery, and it was probably reused or refounded after 1441 as a house of the Third Order Franciscans, a branch of the Franciscan movement whose members typically lived in small communities outside the walls of conventional friary life. A church and graveyard occupy the interior. The graveyard has its own quiet history of alteration: the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it as an unenclosed circular space, a shape that would have matched the broader enclosure around it, but the present layout is square, bounded by a mortared stone wall that appears to date from the mid-nineteenth century. Sometime around 1971, a researcher named Melvin recorded the discovery of a rectangle of stones a short distance outside the old boundary, possibly an ancient grave, though no trace of it is visible at the surface today. A gap of around ten metres in the eastern bank may be an original entrance, though whether it was always there or is simply a point where the earthwork has been broken over the centuries is not certain.