That inner enclosure measures roughly 100 metres east to west and 110 metres north to south, a tidy quadrilateral that feels like the whole story. It is not. Beneath and beyond it, the archaeology suggests something considerably larger and more layered than the well-tended precinct most people walk through.

The visible enclosure may itself be superimposed on an earlier inner boundary, a common arrangement at significant monastic sites, where successive generations rebuilt and reordered the sacred space without erasing its underlying geometry. But the more remarkable feature is the outer enclosure, of which almost nothing legible survives on three sides. Bounded to the north, east, and south by the Glendasan and Glenealo rivers, which together form a natural perimeter, this outer zone would have stretched at least 400 metres from east to west. The western edge has left no clear trace at all. What does survive, on the north-eastern line of this larger boundary, is a two-arched gatehouse, a rare and substantial remnant that marks the formal entrance to what was once a much more extensive sacred and working landscape. A wall extension on the south side of the inner entrance also divides off the northern third of the graveyard, a subdivision whose purpose is no longer obvious but which hints at distinctions, perhaps between different categories of the buried dead, that have long since been forgotten.

The gatehouse is worth seeking out specifically. Standing on the north-eastern approach, its two arches frame the transition between the outer monastic precinct and the inner enclosure, and it remains one of the better-preserved early ecclesiastical gatehouses in Ireland. The rivers that once defined the outer boundary are still there, running along their respective valleys, and walking the perimeter with those dimensions in mind gives a sense of how large and deliberately organised the original foundation truly was.