That raised profile and the oval shape are characteristic of an early Irish ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind typically associated with a church or monastic foundation predating the Norman period. Yet when surveyors recorded the site on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1838, they noted a church and graveyard but found no physical trace of any early church building. Whatever stood here originally had vanished entirely by then.

The church that does stand on the site today was built in 1829, and it sits just outside and to the west of the enclosure, as if acknowledging that it is a latecomer to ground that was already long in use. The enclosure itself measures roughly 45 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south. The graveslabs within it date mainly to the eighteenth century, the earliest carrying the date 1712. A notable feature among them is a large collection of purple slate markers, worked in the same distinctive style as those found at the nearby Ballymoat graveyard. The repetition of that style across two sites suggests a local tradition of stonemasonry, possibly a single workshop or craftsman supplying monuments across the area, though the precise origin has not been firmly established.