Fewer notice that the abbey sits inside something older and larger: a subrectangular enclosure, roughly 250 metres east to west and 210 metres north to south, once defined by a substantial mortared stone wall. This was not a garden in any domestic sense but a precinct wall, marking out the formal boundary of the monastic complex. The fact that it is recorded in the official monuments register as a "walled enclosure" rather than by any more evocative name tells you something about how quietly it sits in the historical record.

The wall is fragmentary now, its survival patchy but legible if you know where to look. The best-preserved section stands at the northern end of the east side, where undressed blocks and boulders laid in random courses reach a height of around 2.5 metres and a width of nearly a metre. Elsewhere the original fabric has been absorbed, replaced, or simply levelled. Along the northern stretch, a later field wall, itself largely tumbled, runs over the line of the earlier one, with the foundations of the older wall showing through intermittently beneath it. The north-east corner survives for under two metres before the trace runs southward for roughly 25 metres, again picked up by a later wall following the same alignment. On the west, the wall has nearly vanished entirely, surviving only as a foundation line between the south-west corner and the road into the site. Just north of that road stands the gatehouse, and north of the gatehouse the enclosing wall curves away in fragments. Inside this ghostly perimeter, the land has been divided into long narrow fields running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, striping the interior in a way that speaks to centuries of agricultural reuse. The abbey itself sits to the south of centre within this subdivided space, a striking reminder that monastic precincts rarely stayed frozen in the form their builders intended.