Ring barrows, as the name suggests, are roughly circular burial monuments in which a central mound is enclosed by a ditch and, typically, an outer bank. What makes this group particularly intriguing is not just their number or their proximity, but the larger landscape they occupy. All five sit within the banks of a cursus monument, a long, parallel-banked enclosure of Neolithic origin, and archaeologists have not been able to determine whether the barrow builders were incorporating the cursus into their own design or simply working around what was already there.

When O'Kelly recorded the site in 1944, he noted four barrows with overall diameters ranging from around 20 to 23 metres and standing between 0.9 and 1.4 metres high, though the northernmost had already lost much of its mound and almost all of its bank to digging. That northernmost barrow carries the name 'Carn of Uainide' on the Ordnance Survey map, a detail that gestures toward a long tradition of mythologising the hill. The antiquarian Westropp, without strong supporting evidence by his own account, associated the individual mounds with four legendary figures connected to Knockainy: Uainide, Eoghabal, Áine, and Fer Fi. Áine, in particular, is a sovereignty goddess closely linked to this hill in Irish tradition. A fifth barrow, lying directly east of the Carn of Uainide, went unrecorded until Condit and Coyne described the group in 2004; its outer bank has been completely levelled, though its ditch survives best on the southern side.

The hill is accessible from the village of Knockainy, south of Hospital in County Limerick. The barrows sit towards the south-west end of the cursus, to the west of the Doonainy cairn, and several are partially obscured by field fences that cut across the group. On the ground, the monuments read as low, grassy swellings rather than dramatic earthworks, and some patience is needed to distinguish individual mounds from the general contours of the hillside. Aerial photographs taken by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in 2002 and 2003 give a clearer sense of the linear arrangement and the relationship between the barrows and the cursus banks, and consulting these before a visit helps orient what can otherwise seem like an ambiguous piece of ground.