That detail, recorded at the start of the twentieth century, is what lifts this otherwise unremarkable patch of ground out of the ordinary. An enclosure that resists the plough by revealing its dead is not easily forgotten.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905 in his four-volume history of the diocese of Ossory, noted that the field lay roughly half a mile north-west of the local chapel and measured about three-quarters of an acre. Within it sat a square enclosure approximately 53 yards across, defined by a rampart and a fosse, that is, a raised earthen bank and an accompanying ditch, the standard defensive or boundary arrangement of early medieval religious sites in Ireland. Carrigan recorded the local tradition that this had once been the site of an ancient monastery, and the field name supports that reading: Shannavŏhaun, an anglicisation of the Irish for "old hut" or "old dwelling", is the kind of placename that tends to preserve memory of a long-vanished structure long after the structure itself has disappeared. The field was still known locally as Shannovohaun in 2019, and the enclosure itself remained visible on satellite imagery, sitting roughly a kilometre north-west of St. Coleman's church.

The square plan is itself worth noting. Monastic enclosures in early Christian Ireland are more commonly circular or subcircular, following the form of the secular ringfort, a roughly circular earthwork used as a farmstead or settlement. A square or rectilinear enclosure of this kind is less typical, which may partly explain why the site attracted Carrigan's attention in the first place. Whether the graveyard evidence and the monastic tradition belong to the same phase of the site's use, or represent different periods layered on top of one another, is a question the field has not yet been asked to answer properly.