The rock is shaped, roughly, like a seat, and that resemblance alone has been enough to keep scholars arguing about what it actually is. Locally it has come to be known as the Lady's Chair, a quietly domestic name that sits uneasily alongside older, more charged possibilities.

The site does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, which records the rocky promontory but attributes no special significance to it. By the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition, however, it is marked as an antiquity under the name 'Caheer Baelee', an anglicisation of Cathaoir Baelee, meaning roughly the chair or seat of the Bailey. Lynch, writing in 1913, described it plainly as a large seat formed from natural rock. The name points towards the Bailey family, who acquired lands around nearby Lough Gur in the seventeenth century, and Fitzpatrick (2004) argued that the feature was simply a landlords' chair associated with that family rather than anything of older ceremonial significance. Others have read more into it. Máire MacNeill, in her 1962 study of the harvest festival of Lughnasa, identified Knockderc as a likely Lughnasa site, citing the panoramic views, the stone seat, local folklore concerning buried treasure, and the presence of a subterranean cavity. The Lughnasa festival, held in early August, was traditionally observed at hilltops across Ireland with gatherings, games, and rituals marking the beginning of harvest. Surrounding the hill, within a few hundred metres, are several stone circles, which lend the wider landscape a prehistoric density that makes any single interpretation feel insufficient. A twentieth-century quarry has since removed much of the southern and eastern portions of the monument, leaving its full original extent unclear.

The site sits on a rocky promontory where the ground drops steeply to the west, south, and east, with flatter ground extending north towards the hilltop. What survives of the chair, possibly along the western margin of the quarried area, offers views south, west, and south-east across a stretch of Limerick landscape that would have made the position feel conspicuous in any era. Visiting in late summer, when the Lughnasa associations feel most tangible, and approaching from the north where the ground is more forgiving, makes practical sense. The stone circles in the immediate vicinity are worth locating on a map beforehand, as the cluster of monuments rewards attention as a landscape rather than as isolated curiosities.