No earthwork breaks the surface, no mound catches the eye, and no trace of it appears on any historical Ordnance Survey map. The only record of its existence comes from a single aerial photograph taken during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, in which the buried feature showed up as an oval-shaped cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that appears when crop growth is subtly affected by buried ditches or banks below the plough line. Since then, later satellite imagery from multiple sources, including an OSi orthophoto from the 2005 to 2012 period, a Digital Globe orthoimage from 2011 to 2013, and a Google Earth image from November 2018, has revealed nothing at all.

Cropmarks are among the quieter tools of field archaeology. When soil conditions are right, usually during a dry summer, buried features can influence how grass or grain grows above them, creating variations in colour or height that only become legible from altitude. The enclosure at Knockballyfookeen was caught in exactly this way, its oval outline briefly legible from the air before improved drainage and continued agricultural activity apparently erased or buried whatever traces remained near the surface. The surrounding landscape offers some context: a ring-barrow, a low circular burial mound of prehistoric origin, lies roughly 110 metres to the south-southwest, and the enclosure sits 125 metres northeast of the townland boundary with Ballyhurst. The presence of a ring-barrow nearby at least suggests that the area carries some depth of early activity, though no direct relationship between the two monuments has been established.

There is no meaningful way to stand at this site and observe it. The pasture has been cut through by land drains and watercourses, and the enclosure itself leaves no surface impression. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely that absence: the record of it exists almost entirely in one archived aerial photograph, labelled Bruff 267, AP 4/3677, taken during a survey that captured a landscape now largely altered. The site was compiled for the record by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly, uploaded in October 2020, and it sits in the national monuments database as a reminder that a great deal of what once shaped this countryside is now only intermittently, and sometimes only briefly, visible.