It is a peculiar category of place, one that has been recorded, measured, and catalogued, yet has since been erased from the landscape entirely. When fieldworkers visited in June 1984, they found an almost square enclosure sitting on a low hummock, the kind of slight natural rise that early settlers in waterlogged terrain often chose for practical reasons. It measured roughly 22 metres northwest to southeast and 21 metres northeast to southwest, its outline traced by a stony earthen bank along three sides and a scarp, a sharper drop in the ground level, along the eastern edge. Even then it was poorly preserved, and the trees that had grown across it, which might once have marked it on the horizon, had already been felled.

Enclosures of this general type are found widely across Ireland, and their functions vary considerably. Some were early ecclesiastical boundaries, others the enclosing walls of ringfort settlements where families and their livestock sheltered during the early medieval period. Without excavation, it is rarely possible to say with certainty what purpose any individual example served, and the Killachunna enclosure left no such evidence behind. Aerial photography taken in March 2016 confirmed what the felling of the trees had perhaps already suggested: the monument had been levelled in the intervening decades, the bank and scarp reduced to nothing detectable from above. What the 1984 inspection captured was effectively the final record of something that had probably stood, in some form, for well over a thousand years.