The monastery attributed to St. Gobán Fionn, whose feast day falls on the 6th of December, would originally have been defined by a circular enclosure, the kind of boundary that early Irish monasteries used to mark sacred ground from the surrounding countryside. No trace of that boundary is visible at ground level today, but the landscape here has its own quiet logic: the church sits on raised ground at the base of a hill, the land drops sharply to the north into a small valley, and a hillock immediately beyond that carries a high cross, with the whole complex gathered within a graveyard. These separate elements are fragments of something that once had a more coherent shape.

The site's origins were recorded by Carrigan in 1905, drawing on earlier tradition to place the foundation of the monastery in the early 600s. What survives above ground hints at the original layout without confirming it. About thirteen metres north of the graveyard's northern wall, there is a curving scarp running for roughly forty metres, which may represent either an earlier graveyard boundary or a remnant arc of the ecclesiastical enclosure itself. An ecclesiastical enclosure of this type, a roughly circular earthen or stone boundary defining the monastery precinct, was a common feature of early medieval Irish religious sites, though few survive intact. The scarp at Killamery stops short of the eastern field boundary, and this gap corresponds with a pathway visible on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1839, which shows a route running from the south side of the village and entering the graveyard at the north-east corner of its northern side. The path was already old when it was mapped.

The valley to the north-west holds St. Nicholas's holy well, a further element in a cluster of early medieval features that together suggest the original monastery occupied a carefully chosen and deliberately arranged piece of ground. The high cross on its hillock, the well in the valley below, the curving scarp behind the graveyard wall: none of these things announces itself, but taken together they trace the outline of something much older than what is currently visible.