The earthwork that was carefully mapped in 1841 by the Ordnance Survey, recorded as a circular embanked enclosure roughly twenty metres across, is no longer visible in any recognisable form. In its place sits a roughly circular patch of uneven, briar-choked ground, elevated about ninety centimetres above the surrounding terrain, betraying the shape of something that was once deliberately constructed.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They served as farmsteads, offering a degree of protection for people and livestock. The Knockroe example was still legible enough in 1841 to be plotted on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of that year, one of the most thorough cartographic exercises ever conducted in Ireland, which means the enclosure survived into the nineteenth century in reasonable condition. What appears to have undone it, according to fieldwork compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011, was something mundane rather than deliberate: when a dwelling house was built approximately twenty metres to the south of the site, topsoil was dumped across the old earthwork. That house is itself now abandoned, leaving two kinds of ruin sitting in proximity on the same hilltop.

The site sits atop a hill, with a public road forming its northern boundary, which makes it technically approachable, though the ground is heavily overgrown with briars and scrub. There is nothing here that announces itself as a heritage site, and no features are likely to be visible to the casual eye. What a careful observer might notice is the subtle but consistent rise of that roughly oval area of disturbed earth, slightly higher than everything around it, measuring about twenty-two metres north to south and twenty metres east to west. The brambles have done an effective job of discouraging closer inspection, and the combination of tipped soil and decades of vegetation makes it difficult to read the original profile. It is, in the end, a site better understood through its map entry than through its present appearance.