There are no signs, no fences marking it off as significant, and the surrounding farmland offers little by way of context. Yet this earthwork at Knockanebrack has been sitting in the landscape long enough to appear on the very first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, drawn in 1840, where it was recorded as a circular-shaped platform. That alone places it within a tradition of earthwork construction stretching back, in Irish terms, potentially thousands of years.

By the time the Ordnance Survey returned with its more detailed 25-inch mapping in 1897, the feature was recorded as a raised sub-circular area measuring roughly 55 metres north to south and 45 metres east to west, defined by a scarp, which is essentially a steep natural or artificial slope, and a fosse, meaning a surrounding ditch. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland examined it in 1999, the dimensions had reduced somewhat, to approximately 39 metres by 35 metres, likely reflecting the gradual encroachment of agricultural use over the intervening century. The scarp at that point still stood 1.8 metres high, and the fosse measured just over 2 metres in width. A relict field boundary, the kind of low earthen bank left over from older agricultural arrangements, runs along the outer edge of the fosse from the north-northeast, and a separate field boundary crosses the monument at the northeast corner. A barrow, a type of burial mound, lies about 250 metres to the east, hinting that this corner of the Limerick-Tipperary borderland was once a more organised and perhaps ceremonially significant landscape than the quiet grazing fields suggest today.

The site sits roughly 70 metres east of a watercourse that doubles as both the townland boundary with Longford and the county boundary with Tipperary, which gives some sense of its position within the wider landscape. Access would be from surrounding public roads, and the monument lies in private farmland, so permission from the landowner would be needed before approaching closely. The clearest impression of its shape is actually obtained from aerial imagery; the outline of the overgrown monument is visible on Google Earth orthoimages, where the circular form reads more legibly from above than it likely does at ground level, where the scarp and fosse merge into the general unevenness of grazed pasture.