The enclosure, roughly 170 metres in diameter, once surrounded the Granard church and graveyard at its centre, but so much of it has been absorbed into the working landscape that walking the site gives almost no sense of its original scale or completeness.

The enclosure's shifting presence across successive maps is itself telling. On the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map it appears as a curved field fence running along the western side of the townland boundary, with the church and graveyard recorded just to the east. By the 1905 revision it had disappeared from the cartographic record entirely, perhaps regarded as too fragmentary or unremarkable to plot. It reappears on the 1937 survey, this time rendered as a large circular enclosure, bisected off-centre to the south-west by that same townland boundary. On the ground today, the interior is partly defined by an earthen field boundary and a low scarp no more than half a metre high; the southern and western portions of the enclosing bank and its fosse, a ditch typically accompanying such earthworks, leave no surface trace at all. What the eye misses, however, aerial photography has since recovered. Photographs taken in July 1989 as part of the Cork Archaeological Survey Aerial Photography programme revealed cropmarks of three concentric fosses to the south-west, spaced roughly twenty metres apart, with a bank visible inside the outermost. A possible entrance or pathway showed on the north side, connecting the inner and outer fosses, and some hundred metres to the north-east a further cropmark traced a possible trackway running for approximately 350 metres between parallel fosses. Ecclesiastical enclosures of this kind, typically associated with early medieval Irish monastic or church settlements, often incorporated multiple concentric boundaries that defined zones of sanctuary or land use.

One detail at ground level rewards attention: a well sits on the south-eastern line of the enclosure, enclosed within a small stone-built structure and topped by a pump house, with a concrete trough adjoining it and a shallow stone basin set into the well wall. Wells positioned on the boundary of an early church enclosure were not accidental; they frequently held religious or communal significance within the life of the settlement, and this one, however altered by later practical additions, sits precisely where the archaeology would predict it to be.