These enclosures, typically defined by an earthen bank or a low stone wall forming a roughly circular boundary, were the defining spatial feature of early medieval Irish religious life. The enclosed area would have contained a church, perhaps a cemetery, and the working spaces of a small religious community. The shape itself, that insistence on a curved boundary rather than a rectilinear one, is often the most legible clue to a site's age and purpose when all other structures have long since disappeared into the ground.