That combination of partial survival, one edge defined by an adjoining structure and the rest ghosted into the soil, is what gives the site its particular character. It is a place that has to be inferred as much as seen.

The enclosure belongs to a class of early ecclesiastical sites found across Ireland, where a curving boundary bank or ditch marked out sacred ground associated with a church, a burial area, and sometimes a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage whose purpose could range from storage to refuge. Here, the eastern half of the circle contains a subrectangular enclosure and a possible souterrain, while the western half preserves the site of a burial ground and what may be an individual burial. The name of the townland itself is the most direct evidence for the religious character of the place. Translated from the Irish as Cill Chuilinn, meaning the church of St Cuileann, the placename was recorded by O'Donoghue in 1986, and the glen immediately to the west of the site appears on older Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as Glennakilla, carrying the same root. As far back as 1939, Hartnett noted that both the field and the inner enclosure were still locally known simply as Kill, the Irish word for a church or monastic cell, suggesting the memory of its religious function outlasted any visible structure by centuries. St Cuileann is otherwise obscure, but the pattern of a small enclosed hilltop site with associated burial ground is entirely consistent with early medieval Irish ecclesiastical practice.