That absence from the photographic record is itself telling. These are not ruined monuments so much as nearly vanished ones, worn to near-nothing by time and waterlogged ground, surviving in the archaeological record largely because two researchers thought to look carefully at the landscape in the 1940s.

A ring-barrow is a burial mound of the Bronze Age or Iron Age, typically a low earthen heap encircled by a shallow ditch called a fosse. What makes the Knockfennell group unusual is their arrangement. When O'Kelly described the site in 1944, he recorded not just isolated barrows but a rectangular platform, roughly 22.8 metres north to south and 13.7 metres east to west, with its own surrounding fosse and no recognisable entrance. Pressed against the southern end of this platform, side by side, were two barrows, one oval and one circular, each with fosses that merged into the rectangle's own ditch. A third barrow, also circular and approximately 7.3 metres in diameter, lay just to the south, its fosse conjoined with that of the oval mound beside it. Ó Ríordáin and MacDermott, cataloguing the area in 1949, designated the whole complex Site Y, noting that the ring-barrows appeared to have been cut directly into the surface of the platform. The monuments sit just at the edge of what O'Kelly described as an extensive marsh, which may partly explain both their poor preservation and their absence from the Ordnance Survey's historic mapping.

The site lies in low-lying, wet pasture in the angle of two land drains, about 160 metres south-west of the townland boundary with Ballingoola. Because the monuments do not appear on Digital Globe orthophotos from 2011 to 2013, nor on Google Earth imagery from June 2018, anyone visiting should not expect to see clearly defined earthworks from a distance or from above. The ground conditions make access awkward, particularly in wetter months, and what remains visible, if anything, would require close inspection at ground level. The value here is less in what can be seen and more in what the careful documentary record, assembled by O'Kelly and then by Ó Ríordáin and MacDermott, preserves about a complex that the landscape has otherwise done its best to swallow.