An embanked barrow, broadly speaking, is a prehistoric funerary monument, a mound or enclosed platform associated with burial, and this one at Knockroe carries the additional curiosity of a local place name, Oileán na crú, that hints at a memory older than the Ordnance Survey maps that first formally recorded it.

The monument was surveyed by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in 2007, which found a circular area roughly 15 metres in diameter enclosed by an earth and stone bank nearly five metres wide. Outside that sits a fosse, the term for the encircling ditch that typically accompanies such structures, and beyond the fosse a further outer bank. A causewayed entrance, meaning a deliberate raised gap across the ditch, sits at the east-northeast, and an earlier description from around 1960, recorded by O'Dwyer, noted a gap on the east side that may also mark an original entrance. Gaps in the outer bank appear at the north-northwest and south-southwest as well. The western side of the monument has been cut by a later linear field bank, and a rectangular depression in the interior is thought to mark the spot where a trigonometric station once stood, the kind of survey marker that nineteenth-century cartographers planted on high ground across the country. Some 70 metres to the southwest lies a possible pond barrow, a rarer type of monument in which the central area is actually scooped hollow, and 45 metres to the west is a ringfort, an early medieval enclosed settlement, making this ridge an unusually dense pocket of layered occupation.

The monument sits in reclaimed pasture and is visible on aerial photography, including images taken in 2000 and 2003 by the ASI, as well as more recent satellite imagery. For anyone approaching on foot, the ridge offers open ground, and the earthwork reads clearly as a slight but distinct rise with a perceptible hollow at its centre. The outer bank is most legible from the northwest through to the south and from the west-southwest. The truncation on the western side is worth noting when trying to read the full original circuit, which would once have been complete.