What makes this place quietly odd is not the earthwork itself but the name by which local people have long known it. The field is called 'The Shountore', a phrase that carries two Irish echoes at once: 'sanctóir', meaning a sanctuary, and 'seantóir', meaning an old church or burial place. The same field was also recorded by Bowman in 1934 as 'The Glebe', the term for land traditionally set aside for the support of a parish church. Two names, both pointing in the same direction, yet the ground itself offers no obvious building to explain either of them.

The enclosure is a substantial one, measuring roughly 139 metres north-north-west to south-south-east and about 115 metres across at its widest point. Kilcorcoran graveyard adjoins it on the east side and pushes slightly inside the boundary, which is suggestive in itself. A mound on that eastern side, close to the graveyard wall, was interpreted by Linehan in 1997 as the probable site of an earlier church. But the mound appears to be part of a low internal bank that curves from the western side of the enclosure across to the north-west corner of the graveyard, and if that bank were projected further, it would effectively describe a second, smaller oval of around 110 metres by 100 metres, nestling within the larger one. The implication, noted by archaeologist C. Manning, is that what looks like a single enclosure may preserve the outline of a two-phase or subdivided early ecclesiastical site. A holy well lies roughly 80 metres to the south, a further detail that fits the pattern of early Irish religious landscapes, where a well, an enclosure, and a burial ground frequently occur together as a cluster rather than in isolation.