Less remarked upon is the fact that the abbey and its surroundings preserve traces of an older, more complex landscape, one that includes an enclosure whose precise character and origins remain formally unrecorded in any publicly accessible survey.

An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is simply a defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these, and the term covers an enormous range of purposes and periods, from prehistoric ceremonial sites to early medieval farmsteads and monastic precincts. The difficulty at Jerpoint is that the specific enclosure recorded here has not yet been fully documented in any available public record, which means the usual framework of dates, associated finds, and functional interpretation cannot be offered with any confidence. What can be said is that Jerpoint as a place-name and landscape carries layers of occupation stretching back well before the Cistercians arrived. The abbey itself was established around 1160, initially under Benedictine rule before passing to the Cistercians, and the wider townland almost certainly contains earthworks and boundaries that predate, overlap with, or postdate that monastic presence in ways that have not been fully untangled.

For anyone visiting the area, the abbey ruins are accessible and well signposted off the N9 between Thomastown and Gowran. The enclosure itself, as a monument distinct from the abbey complex, is the kind of feature that rewards slow movement through the surrounding fields and margins, where slight changes in ground level or the alignment of old boundaries sometimes say more than any upstanding structure.