A ringfort once occupied a gentle west-facing slope here, its circular earthen bank and outer fosse intact as recently as 1982. Today, the ground gives nothing away. The pasture rolls softly, and there is no visible trace of what once stood thirty-two metres across.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the standard farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They consisted of a raised circular bank, sometimes faced with stone, enclosing a domestic area where a family and their animals lived. The outer fosse, a ditch dug to throw up the bank material, reinforced both the enclosure's structure and its social signal: this was a bounded, defended place. The Knockkelly example was documented by Cahill in 1982, when it was still legible in the landscape, classified on the basis of its earthwork remains, including that bank and fosse arrangement, with a diameter of thirty-two metres. At some point between that visit and the present, the monument was levelled, most likely through agricultural activity, leaving no surface expression whatsoever.