Roughly fifteen metres across and defined by a stony bank, it vanished so thoroughly into the vegetation that excavation was needed to confirm its outline at all. What was found beneath the overgrowth was not some ancient monastic boundary but something more specifically purposeful, a feature designed, it seems, to manage the movement of people rather than simply to demarcate sacred ground.

The excavation was carried out by Liam de Paor between 1972 and 1976, uncovering a drystone wall construction comparable to the enclosures around two of the island's churches, St. Brigid's and St. Michael's. Drystone walling is exactly what it sounds like, stone laid without mortar, relying on careful placement for its stability, and it was a common technique in early medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture. Some paving survived around the inner perimeter of this enclosure, suggesting a path or circuit. Within the south-western quadrant sat a structure known as the Confessional. De Paor concluded that the whole arrangement was a relatively late development, associated with the remodelling of the island for pilgrimage rounds in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. There was no evidence of an earlier enclosure on this spot, meaning the feature was not an ancient survival adapted for later use but something created fresh to serve the needs of organised devotion. Pilgrimage rounds, in which participants moved in a prescribed circuit between sacred stations, were a well-established form of popular piety in Ireland, and the layout here seems to reflect exactly that kind of choreographed religious practice. The enclosure is no longer extant at ground level, leaving a site that is easier to understand from the archaeological record than from anything visible today.