It is easy to walk past without registering what it actually is: a ring-barrow, a prehistoric funerary monument in which the central burial mound is enclosed within a circular fosse (a flat-bottomed ditch) and an earthen bank beyond it. These features, repeated across Ireland from the Bronze Age onward, were the burial places of individuals significant enough to warrant a permanent, visible marker in the landscape.

The Knocknaranhy example is a compact but well-defined specimen. The central mound is almost circular, measuring roughly 13.6 metres north to south and 13.2 metres east to west at its base, rising between 0.3 and 0.9 metres above the surrounding ground. Around it, the fosse runs three to four and a half metres wide at its base, partly filled now with rushes and furze, and beyond that an outer bank varies between nearly five and almost eight metres wide at its base, its profile changing subtly as you move around it: round-topped to the west and east, flat-topped to the north and south. The bank itself has been partly colonised by furze on its north-north-east to east arc, and a later field wall has been built over its outer edge from the north-north-east round to the south-east, the kind of incremental agricultural overlay that makes reading these sites in the field a matter of patient attention. The monument appears on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan of 1897 and again on the 1920 edition of the six-inch map, marked with the hatching surveyors used to indicate earthworks. It was noted as a barrow on Tim Robinson's 1977 map, though official records as late as 1996 classified it only as an enclosure, a reminder of how long it can take for a site to be properly categorised.

The ridge on which the barrow sits runs east to west, and to the west, roughly 21 metres higher, is a second ring-barrow. The pairing is not unusual; prominent ridgelines were favoured for funerary monuments, both for visibility and perhaps for their perceived closeness to the open sky. Standing at the Knocknaranhy barrow, the wide views across the undulating pastureland make the logic of the location legible even now.