No earthwork breaks the surface, no obvious feature interrupts the farmland. The only way to perceive it at all is from above, where the buried ditch, or fosse, that once defined its perimeter leaves a ghostly impression in the crop growth, a cropmark of the kind that forms when buried features alter how soil retains moisture and nutrients, causing the plants above them to grow or ripen slightly differently. Satellite imagery, including aerial photography captured between 2004 and 2006, reveals the ring clearly enough, along with a possible second, outer fosse in the north-eastern quadrant that hints at a more elaborate original design.

The site was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, and it does not exist in isolation. Around 65 metres to the south-west lies another enclosure, and roughly 215 metres further in the same direction sits a ringfort, the kind of circular enclosed settlement that was common across Ireland during the early medieval period. Whether this cluster reflects a single period of activity or centuries of separate occupation is not clear, but the proximity of three distinct enclosed sites in such a compact area suggests this corner of Kilkenny was once considerably more inhabited or organised than its present agricultural surface implies. The place name itself, Knocktopherabbey, carries the traces of earlier layers too, combining the Irish for hill and road with a reference to a religious house, though the enclosure recorded here appears unconnected to any known monastic context.