By the late nineteenth century, it was taken as given that the burial ground of St. Brecaun's church had long since eroded into the water below, a belief recorded by Redmond in 1898. When archaeologists excavated the site in 1987, they found no burials anywhere, which seemed to confirm the loss. Yet the dig also revealed something the sea had not taken: clear evidence that the church once sat within a formal ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of boundary ditch, known as a fosse, that early Irish monasteries and church foundations used to define sacred ground and separate it from the secular landscape.

The fosse, roughly two to three metres wide and around 0.8 metres deep, was partly uncovered about twelve metres to the west-southwest of the church during the 1987 excavation led by Breen. The same feature is also visible in the cliff-face about twenty-five metres to the north, where erosion has cut a cross-section through it, preserving a record in the exposed earth that the sea has elsewhere destroyed. The 1987 dig also produced an unexpected find: the final missing fragment of an ogham stone previously associated with the site. Ogham is an early medieval script, used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by notched or scored lines along a central stem. Recovering the last piece of a known but incomplete stone was a quiet but significant moment. A small granite cross, just under forty centimetres tall, with a square shaft and an incised cross with expanded terminals on one face, had already left the site by around 1900, moved to the graveyard at Churchtown, where it remains according to Colfer's 1978 account.