They are not quite tall enough to be the paired portal stones of a megalithic tomb, not obviously part of a stone row, and not clearly the remnants of a field boundary. The label attached to them, "anomalous stone group", is itself a kind of admission: these stones have been recorded, measured, and quietly set aside in the category of things that do not fit.

The two uprights are modest in scale, one standing close to a metre high and roughly a metre wide, the other slightly shorter and considerably thinner. What gives the site its particular interest is what lies around them. Further stones protrude at low level from the surrounding bog, and these may be the exposed remnants of a wall that predates the bog's formation. Blanket bog in Ireland typically began accumulating in earnest during the Bronze Age and into the early medieval period, as a combination of climatic deterioration and forest clearance waterlogged the landscape. When it swallows older structures, it can preserve them in fragmentary, half-visible form for centuries, leaving only the tallest elements poking above the surface. If the low stones at Knockoura do represent a pre-bog wall, the two uprights may once have formed part of a field system, an enclosure, or some structure whose original form the bog has long since obscured.