The enclosure is subrectangular, measuring twenty metres east to west and sixteen metres north to south, and its walls, built of large slabs set on edge with a rubble core between two faced surfaces, still stand a metre high in places. A two-metre gap in the western wall likely served as an entrance. What makes the interior particularly striking is not just the possible burials, but the concentration of early religious objects clustered in its southern half: a leacht, which is a low commemorative cairn or altar associated with early Irish devotion; a cross-slab; the socket of a cross, suggesting a now-missing upright once stood there; the shaft of what may be another cross; and a group of objects identified as cursing stones, smooth rocks whose ritual repositioning was once understood to invoke harm upon an enemy.

The enclosure is almost certainly the burial ground that appears by name, though without a precise location marked, on both the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map and its 1899 resurvey. Those maps placed it to the west of the church, which created a degree of ambiguity about the site's exact position that only physical investigation eventually resolved. The island itself, known in Irish as Cruach na Cara, has long been associated with the sixth-century saint Macdara, whose small oratory church, built in the distinctive antae style with projecting stone pillars, survives as one of the most complete early medieval ecclesiastical buildings in Ireland. The enclosure beside it adds another layer to what was clearly a site of sustained and varied religious practice, where commemoration, prayer, and older, less easily categorised rituals appear to have coexisted.