Less remarked upon is the fact that the abbey does not sit in isolation. In its immediate landscape there are traces of an enclosure, the kind of earthwork boundary that, in an Irish context, might mark anything from an early monastic precinct to a defended settlement, a farm boundary of considerable antiquity, or the ghostly outline of a now-vanished community clustered around the religious house itself.

Enclosures of this type are among the most ambiguous features in the Irish archaeological record. A raised or ditched perimeter can signal an early medieval ecclesiastical site, where the boundary carried as much symbolic as defensive weight, defining sacred ground from secular. Equally, a post-medieval enclosure might simply reflect the agricultural ordering of land after the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, when Jerpoint's buildings and lands passed out of monastic use. Without excavation or detailed survey it is often impossible to say with confidence which period a given enclosure belongs to, or whether it accumulated meaning across several of them. What can be said is that Jerpoint's broader landscape, already layered with the remains of a medieval town at Newtown Jerpoint nearby, repays careful attention beyond the abbey walls.