The category alone, earthwork, covers a wide range of ancient human effort: field boundaries, enclosures, platforms, burial mounds, or the remains of defunct ringforts. Without further detail, the feature at Knockanoura belongs to that quietly frustrating category of Irish archaeology, known to exist, mapped and assigned a monument number, but not yet accompanied by any published description of what it actually looks like or what it might have been for.

Clare is a county with an unusually dense archaeological record, from the limestone pavements of the Burren, where ancient field walls survive beneath blanket bog, to the river plains further south where earthworks of various kinds mark out centuries of habitation and land use. An earthwork designation can be applied to almost any deliberate reshaping of ground, and in many cases these features turn out to be the eroded remnants of enclosures that once defined a farmstead, a ceremonial space, or a boundary meaningful to a community long gone. The townland name Knockanoura, derived from the Irish, suggests a hill or knoll of some kind, which might indicate the earthwork occupies an elevated position in the local terrain, though that remains speculative.