The enclosure itself is roughly subcircular, about 140 metres across at its widest, and its boundary is a patchwork of different ages and materials: a low earthen bank on the north, an inward-facing scarp several metres high on the east, a sunken lane worn deep into the ground on the south-west, and, on the west, a working farmyard. A modern road bisects the whole thing. What survives is not a monument held at a careful distance from ordinary life, but a place that has been farmed around, built over, and quietly used for centuries.

The site takes its name from St Molaga, who is said to have founded it and who died around 664 AD. By the medieval period it was recorded in the topographical text Crichad an Chaoilli as 'Eidhnen Molaga with its termon', the chief church of the Tuath O Cuscraidh Sleibhe, a territorial designation placing it at the centre of local ecclesiastical authority. A termon was a zone of sanctuary surrounding a church, legally distinct from secular land. At the centre of the enclosure is a graveyard containing the ruins of two churches, a saint's tomb, a cross-slab, and a bullaun stone, the last being a boulder with one or more rounded hollows worn or cut into it, associated across Ireland with early Christian sites and, before that, with older ritual use. Excavations carried out by Rose Cleary in 1995 found post-holes, a curving slot trench that may have enclosed an earlier oval structure, and burials including a young adult and a child. Charcoal and iron slag from the site may be pre-medieval in date. Twelve quern stone fragments and part of a horizontal millstone nearly a metre in diameter point to milling activity nearby, and a mill at 'Neynan Molag' is mentioned in the Pipe Roll of Cloyne, an ecclesiastical financial record, around 1364. Not everything has stayed in place: a second cross-slab and a stone cross were removed from the site to the Office of Public Works depot in Mallow at some point before the site was formally recorded.