What makes this particular site worth a second look is the landscape it sits within: the church and burials occupy a position just south of centre inside a large oval earthen enclosure measuring roughly 100 metres north to south and 65 metres east to west. That enclosure, defined along its eastern and western edges by a bank some three metres wide and two metres high with drystone facing, is the older and stranger thing here. There is no fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks, and the likeliest entrance seems to have been at the northwest, approached by a raised path running between two ditches. The whole arrangement sits on a ridge with a short, steep drop to the north and east, the kind of topography that early Christian communities often favoured.

The scholar Liam Price, writing in 1946, identified this as an early ecclesiastical site, the oval enclosure being the kind of curvilinear boundary, known in Irish archaeology as an ecclesiastical enclosure or termon boundary, that frequently marks the footprint of an early medieval religious foundation. Such enclosures, often roughly circular or oval, predate the formal stone churches of the medieval period and can survive long after any associated buildings have vanished. At Churchland, the visible church is a ruined structure from the early nineteenth century, and no physical trace of an earlier building has been found. A cylindrical block of granite noted by Price just outside the southwest corner of the church, along with a scatter of miscellaneous architectural fragments, hints that something older once stood here, though what exactly it was remains unclear. The graveyard itself preserves a notable concentration of mid-eighteenth-century headstones, suggesting continuous use of the site well before the existing ruin was built.