The enclosure, roughly 74 metres north to south and just over 80 metres east to west, shows up as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that appears in aerial photographs when buried features affect how the vegetation above them grows. A ditch of this scale, running almost unbroken except for a short eastern section that now falls within a separate field boundary, suggests something deliberately and substantially enclosed, though no definitive entrance gap has been identified, which only deepens the uncertainty about what this place once was.

The landscape around it adds context without resolving the mystery. About 215 metres to the northwest, a ringfort once stood before it was levelled sometime after 1990; it too now survives only as a cropmark. A ringfort is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, common across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards and typically associated with farmsteads. Whether the Killinure enclosure belongs to that same tradition or to an earlier one is not clear. What is clear is that the area has a long history of human activity. Roughly 1.6 kilometres to the east-northwest lie the remains of Aghowle Church, associated with St Finnian and regarded as a significant early ecclesiastical site. Its surviving monuments include a high cross and more than twenty cross slabs, suggesting a place of considerable religious importance over many centuries. Aerial photography from July 2021 also hints at a smaller circular cropmark overlapping the ditch in the southwestern quadrant of the enclosure, raising the possibility of two phases of use or two distinct structures occupying the same ground at different times.