What makes it quietly remarkable is how thoroughly it has managed to evade official notice for so long. It never appeared on Ordnance Survey historic mapping, and when aerial orthophotos were taken between 2011 and 2013, and again in June 2018 via Google Earth, the feature could not be detected from above at all. A monument that once held the dead has become, in its old age, nearly invisible.

The site sits on an elevated area of a gentle south-facing slope in undulating pasture, with open views towards Knockseefin and Pallashill to the west-northwest, a positioning that would not have been accidental in prehistory, when prominent landmarks often oriented the placement of the dead. A barrow, in its simplest form, is an earthen mound raised over a burial, and the circular variety here belongs to a tradition found across Ireland and Britain stretching back thousands of years. The Archaeological Survey of Ireland examined the site in 2008 and recorded a raised circular area measuring roughly eight metres north to south and just over seven metres east to west, enclosed by a low bank. That bank, with an internal height of around sixteen centimetres and an external height of twenty-five centimetres, survives only on the eastern, southern, western, and north-western sides; on the remaining arc it has been reduced to a slight scarp just forty centimetres high. The monument does not stand alone. A ring-barrow and a possible further barrow lie approximately fifty metres to the south-west and east respectively, and a high concentration of similar monuments clusters within a 300-metre radius, suggesting this corner of Knockballyfookeen formed part of a much larger funerary landscape.

Access to the site is across private farmland, so permission from the landowner would be necessary before approaching. The immediate surroundings include a wide earthen field boundary to the south that resembles an old trackway, alongside a field drain, both of which give the area a layered, worked quality that contrasts with the ancient mound behind them. Given how slight the surviving earthworks are, the best conditions for reading the monument on the ground are likely a low winter sun from the south or east, which can throw even shallow banks into sharp relief. The ASI survey plans and cross-sections, compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded in July 2020, remain the most detailed record of what is there.