This ring-barrow in Knockainy West came to official attention not through excavation or local knowledge, but through an aerial photograph taken on 5 January 2003, when it showed up as a small circular earthwork from above. Subsequent orthoimagery, captured between 2005 and 2012 by Ordnance Survey Ireland and again on Google Earth in April 2006, confirmed it as a cropmark roughly 13 metres in diameter, the faint but legible signature of something buried and forgotten at ground level.

A ring-barrow is a low, circular burial mound typically surrounded by a ditch, a form of funerary monument associated broadly with the Bronze Age, though examples exist across a wide span of prehistoric periods. What makes this particular site quietly interesting is its company: a second ring-barrow, recorded separately as LI032-311----, lies just 2 metres to the north-west, meaning the two monuments effectively sit side by side in the same rough, waterlogged pasture. The site was compiled for the record by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly, with details uploaded in November 2020. Its invisibility on older maps is not unusual for cropmark sites, which often leave no surface trace legible to cartographers working at ground level.

The monument sits approximately 6 metres south-west of the townland boundary between Knockainy West and Knockainy East, in ground described as improved but still rough and wet, cut through by land drains and watercourses. There is no formal public access, and the agricultural setting means the earthwork is unlikely to be clearly visible to a casual visitor on foot. Cropmarks of this kind tend to show most clearly from the air, or in dry summers when differential crop growth betrays the outline of buried features below. Anyone with a serious interest in the site would do well to cross-reference the Google Earth orthoimage from April 2006 alongside the ASIAP aerial photograph reference 348, 7, which together give the clearest picture of what lies beneath this otherwise unremarkable stretch of County Limerick farmland.