Ring barrows, as these monuments are known, are a type of burial monument typically consisting of a central mound enclosed by a ditch and an outer bank, and this group has the additional distinction of sitting within the banks of a cursus, a type of large, elongated ceremonial enclosure whose relationship to the barrows remains unresolved. Whether the barrow builders respected an existing cursus or the monuments grew up together is, as researchers noted in 2004, genuinely difficult to determine from what survives.

The group was described by O'Kelly in 1944, who measured the northernmost of the four then-recorded barrows at roughly 18.3 metres in overall diameter, with its mound standing approximately 1.2 metres high, though a large portion had already been dug away by that point. The remaining three ranged between 20 and 23 metres in diameter and between 0.9 and 1.4 metres in height. A fifth barrow, lying directly east of the one named on Ordnance Survey maps as the Carn of Uainide, went unrecorded until Condit and Coyne documented it in 2004; its outer bank has been completely levelled, and it is now separated from its neighbour by a field fence. That named barrow, the Carn of Uainide, connects the site to a body of early Irish mythology. The antiquarian Westropp, working without strong evidential backing by his own account, associated the four barrows with four legendary figures said to inhabit Knockainy: Uainide, Eoghabal, Áine, and Fer Fi. Áine in particular is a figure of considerable significance in Irish tradition, associated with the hill itself, which takes its name from her.

The site sits on Knockainy Hill and lies west of the Doonainy cairn, another monument in what amounts to a remarkably dense prehistoric landscape on this summit. Field fences cut across several of the barrows, partly obscuring the second, third, and fourth examples, so reading the monuments on the ground requires some patience. The southernmost barrow, at 28 metres in diameter and with a 15-metre inner mound, is the largest and clearest of the group. Aerial photographs held by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, taken in September 2002 and January 2003, give a much better sense of the linear arrangement than ground-level inspection alone allows.