J. O'Kelly of University College Cork excavated a small earthen enclosure on the south-east-facing slope of Knockea Hill in 1960, he concluded that nothing quite like it had been recorded in Ireland up to that point. The enclosure is roughly square, measuring about 8.4 metres east to west and 8.2 metres north to south, bounded by an earthen bank faced on the interior with dry-stone walling and entered through a narrow western gap less than a metre wide. Within that modest space lay the remains of at least sixty-six individuals, the majority of them children or adolescents, interred in simple unlined pits with almost no grave goods. One burial stood out: a child's grave in the north-west quadrant, carefully edged with small boulders on two sides, whose fill contained 111 water-rolled pebbles, 83 of them white quartz, 28 brown sandstone. No comparable concentration of pebbles appeared anywhere else across the site, and no explanation has been settled upon.

A re-evaluation by Talbot in 2019 revised the picture of the enclosure's physical form considerably, describing it as an almost perfect square, 18 metres by 18 metres externally, defined by a U-shaped ditch surrounding a bank that would have been topped by a timber palisade, with a causewayed entrance on the west side marked by a pair of posts. Most of the inhumations, the practice of burying an intact body rather than cremating it, were orientated east to west with the head to the west, consistent with early Christian burial practice, though one was reversed and three children lay north to south. A crouched burial in the south-west and a grave holding both an adult female and a child added further variation. The finds recovered, among them strike-a-light stones, a stone disc, a bone comb fragment, and a blue glass bead with a white spiral meander from a later hut site on the same ground, were not clearly associated with individual graves and cannot be classed as grave goods in any strict sense. O'Kelly read the whole assemblage as evidence of an early Christian community cemetery, probably serving people who lived on or near the hill, and the pattern of burials points to a foundation date somewhere in the fifth, sixth, or possibly seventh century.

The site sits in rolling pasture on Knockea Hill in County Limerick, with open views to the east, west, and south. It lies approximately 20 metres south-west of a second enclosure at the same location, and both are visible in hillshade survey imagery. The earthworks remain as surface features, though their modest scale, the bank stands only about 0.4 metres above the surrounding ground externally, means they are easy to overlook without prior knowledge of what to look for. The site is on agricultural land, so access requires care and appropriate permissions. Those familiar with Talbot's 2019 study of the broader Knockea complex will find the spatial relationship between the two enclosures easier to read on the ground.