The rectangular walled graveyard occupies only the south-eastern corner of a much older circular earthwork, one that stretches roughly 130 metres north to south and nearly 117 metres east to west. The graveyard, in other words, is a tenant within something considerably larger and considerably older, and most people who have ever stood at its edge would have had no reason to notice.

The enclosure is defined by a ditch, an ecclesiastical enclosure being a roughly circular or ovoid boundary, typically a bank and ditch, used in early medieval Ireland to delimit sacred or monastic ground. Here the ditch runs most clearly along the northern arc, where it measures around six metres wide, and shows intermittently along the south-western quadrant before disappearing beneath the burial ground and its walling to the south-east. No definite entrance gap has been identified. The feature sits on gently sloping ground above the Dereen River, roughly 190 metres to the west, and about 450 metres to the north-east of a ringfort at Tankardstown on the far bank of the same river. That proximity to both a water source and a contemporary secular monument is a pattern familiar from early Christian settlement in Ireland, and the overall picture suggests a religious foundation of some antiquity, though no documentary record appears to confirm it. The enclosure is not visible from ground level in any obvious way; its full dimensions only become legible from aerial photography.