The curving lines of Brackenstown Road, Church Road, and Rathbeale, taken together with the boundary of Swords Glebe, trace what researchers believe to be the original extent of an early monastic enclosure. These curved boundaries are a recognisable feature of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where the monastic precinct, often defined by an earthen bank or wall, gave the surrounding roads their gentle, arcing form as later settlement grew up around them.

The foundation is associated with St. Colmcille, the sixth-century saint also known as Columba, who is credited with establishing a number of monastic communities across Ireland and Scotland. The natural landscape reinforced at least part of the enclosure's boundary: to the south, a steep slope drops down to the Ward river just below Brackenstown Road, providing a ready-made edge that would have required little additional engineering. On the western side, the picture is less obvious on the ground today, but cartographic evidence points to a former laneway recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as marking the likely alignment of the enclosure. That laneway has since been absorbed into what is now St. Columba's Rise housing estate, its ecclesiastical geometry buried beneath twentieth-century brickwork.

There is nothing conventionally visible to examine at the site; no earthworks survive in any obvious form, and the enclosure exists now chiefly as a pattern in the street plan. The most rewarding way to appreciate it is with an Ordnance Survey map in hand, or using a satellite view, tracing how Brackenstown Road curves in a way that feels slightly at odds with its suburban surroundings. The Ward river bank to the south is accessible and gives a sense of the natural topography that originally shaped the site's southern edge. The name of the nearby housing estate, St. Columba's Rise, is itself a quiet acknowledgement of the monastic geography that once organised this entire area.