Among them is an enclosure, the kind of earthwork feature that turns up repeatedly across the Irish countryside, sometimes as the remains of a ringfort, sometimes as a monastic boundary, sometimes as something harder to categorise. At Jerpoint, the enclosure sits within a townland already layered with medieval activity, which raises the question of what, exactly, it was enclosing and for whom.

Enclosures of this type are broadly defined as areas bounded by earthen banks, ditches, or stone walls, and they served many purposes across many centuries. A monastic enclosure might mark the sacred boundary of a religious site. A secular one might have protected a farmstead, its livestock, or a local lord's household. Given Jerpoint's Cistercian foundation, established in the twelfth century and among the most powerful monasteries in Leinster during the medieval period, any enclosure in the vicinity carries the possibility of a connection to that community, whether as part of the abbey's own landholdings or as the trace of an earlier settlement that preceded it. Without excavation or documentary evidence tied specifically to this feature, the question remains open.