The excavation revealed a series of fosses (ditches), pits, and metalled surfaces, the kind of evidence that accumulates quietly in the ground while life goes on above it for centuries. What emerged was not a modest feature but something considerably larger: a pair of curvilinear fosses interpreted as components of a single, very large enclosing ditch, pre-dating the thirteenth century and sitting within the north-western quadrant of a wider ecclesiastical enclosure.

The scale of the gateway alone suggests this was no ordinary boundary. A break in the V-shaped fosse on its eastern side formed an entrance 2.5 metres wide, flanked by two substantial post-holes, with a metalled surface laid between them, the kind of deliberate, engineered threshold that implies a settlement of some consequence. Emly was indeed a place of significance in early Irish Christianity, a bishopric of considerable standing before the medieval reorganisation of the Irish church shifted power elsewhere. That context makes the physical evidence of a large, formally enclosed ecclesiastical precinct less surprising, though no less interesting for that. A burial ground was also uncovered roughly 20 to 40 metres to the north during the same investigations, and St Peter's Well, a holy well of the kind commonly associated with early Christian sites in Ireland, lies approximately 40 metres to the north-west, suggesting that the enclosed area was part of a wider complex of sacred and communal features clustered around the original church foundation.