What marks its boundary is something stranger: a path worn into the blanket bog and heather by the feet of pilgrims over generations, tracing a subtriangular area roughly ninety metres from north to south and ninety-five metres across at its southern end. No bank, no ditch, no stonework defines this space. Instead, the outline has been pressed into the earth by the Turas, the traditional pilgrimage circuit associated with Croagh Patrick, and it shows clearly enough on Ordnance Survey maps from 1920 and 1938, and in aerial photography today. The place has two names: Roilig Mhuire, meaning Mary's Cemetery, and Garraí Mór, meaning Great Enclosure, and both hint at a depth of significance that goes well beyond its unremarkable appearance on the ground.

At the north-western edge of this enclosure sit three cairns, sometimes called penitential stations or leachts, low mounded structures at which pilgrims pause to pray. The 1838 Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled as part of a broader effort to document Irish placenames and local knowledge, recorded the practice in some detail. Having descended from the summit by a steep south-western path, the pilgrim reached the most important of the penitential monuments, where, at each of the three cairns in turn, he or she would recite seven Paters, seven Aves, and one Creed, and travel around each cairn seven times on their knees. With that, the Turas was concluded. The cairns themselves may predate Christianity entirely; there is a possibility that they are prehistoric burial monuments, their earlier significance absorbed and reframed within a Christian devotional landscape rather than erased by it. The name Roilig Mhuire, recorded on the same maps that trace the pilgrims' path, sits uneasily alongside that possibility, suggesting centuries of layered meaning attached to a spot overlooking Lough Nacorra to the south.

The enclosure is not a destination most visitors to Croagh Patrick will seek out separately; it lies along the traditional descent route from the summit cone, and the worn path that constitutes its boundary is best understood from aerial imagery rather than from within it. The three cairns, low and unassuming, are easy to pass without recognising what they represent: the endpoint of a penitential circuit that was already old enough by 1838 to be described as traditional, and old enough before that to carry a name suggesting burial.