A modern house sits on part of its southern arc. Fields have subdivided what remains. And yet, despite all of this, the outline of a large circular enclosure at Keave in County Galway is still readable in the landscape, if you know where to look. Roughly 91 metres in diameter, it survives most convincingly to the east of the road, where the boundary has been absorbed into a bush-covered bank of earth and stone, curving from north-north-west through east to south-south-east and reaching a maximum height of about 1.5 metres. Elsewhere, the evidence is far thinner: a low scarp barely 10 centimetres high marks the western arc, and the southern and western sections have been levelled almost completely.

Enclosures of this kind, large roughly circular earthworks defined by banks and ditches, are found across Ireland in a range of contexts, from early secular settlements to monastic precincts. What lends the Keave example particular interest is its proximity to a set of ecclesiastical remains located approximately 80 metres to the south. That closeness, combined with the enclosure's considerable size, has led archaeologists to suggest it may itself have been ecclesiastical in character, perhaps forming an outer boundary to the same early religious site. Such enclosures were a common feature of early Irish monasticism, defining sacred or functional space around a church or hermitage. The bank here also serves as a townland boundary, which is itself a clue to age: field boundaries and administrative lines in Ireland frequently followed the edges of much older features, preserving their course long after the original structures were forgotten or built over.