What remains is a raised circular area roughly 34.8 metres in diameter, its enclosing bank of earth and stone still surviving in places, though only just. That bank, once perhaps nearly ten metres wide, now barely reaches half a metre in height at its tallest point, and across its northern and southern arc it has been almost completely levelled. There is no trace of a fosse, the external ditch that would typically have accompanied such a feature, and the original entrance has been lost entirely.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. They served as farmsteads for families of some local standing, the earthen or stone banks marking out a domestic space as much as a defensive one. The Knappoge example was substantial enough to be recorded as a large circular enclosure, labelled simply as "Fort", on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837. A later drystone wall was at some point built along the inner edge of the bank, suggesting the site remained in some kind of use long after its original function had been forgotten. What brought the most dramatic change, however, was quarrying carried out in the early 1970s, which destroyed most of the interior. During those operations, according to local information, skeletons were uncovered. No further detail appears to have been formally recorded at the time, leaving open the question of whether those remains relate to the ringfort's original occupation, to a later use of the site, or to something else entirely. It is a detail that sits uneasily, and unresolved.