Knockavota derives from the Irish for "the hill of the moat", which means that long before any cartographer arrived, local people had already identified this gentle slope in County Wexford with the earthwork sitting on it. That kind of embedded memory in a place name is often the oldest record we have of a monument, outlasting written sources by centuries.

The mound itself is a prehistoric barrow, a burial monument of the kind raised across Ireland and Britain during the Bronze Age, though the precise date of this example is unrecorded. It sits on a south-west-facing slope and presents as an oval grass and scrub-covered form, measuring roughly 26 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and 13 metres across, with a height that varies from about 0.6 metres at the northern end to around 1.5 metres elsewhere. Slight traces of a fosse, the shallow ditch typically cut around such mounds either to define them or to provide material for their construction, survive at the north-west and south-east edges. The monument was marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1840, with the later edition describing it explicitly as a tumulus, the Latin term used by early cartographers for a burial mound. That it was already being labelled and recorded in the nineteenth century suggests it was visible and recognisable even then, despite the low profile that scrub and centuries of slow settling can produce.