That gentle deviation in the hedgeline is one of the few surface clues that something circular once defined this part of the landscape at Knockkelly, on a slight rise along a gradual west-facing slope in undulating pasture. The monument itself has been levelled and is no longer visible at ground level.

When the site was visited in 1982, it was still upstanding, measuring around 35 metres in diameter with a bank and an outer fosse, the fosse being a defensive ditch, and it was recorded at that time as a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval enclosed settlement in Ireland. But an aerial photograph taken in 1996 told a more complex story. Seen from above as a cropmark, where buried features affect how grass or crops grow and reveal their outlines in dry conditions, the monument proved considerably larger than previously understood, with an overall diameter of approximately 65 metres. The photograph showed not a simple ringfort but a concentric arrangement: a circular enclosed area, a fosse, then an outer berm roughly 11 metres wide, and a further outer fosse beyond that. The field boundary that curves through the site truncates the berm and outer fosse along its north-north-east to south-east arc, suggesting the enclosure was already partially obscured or ignored when the agricultural landscape around it was laid out.