The name of the townland offers a quiet suggestion: "knock" derives from the Irish "cnoc", meaning hill, while "temple" points toward an ecclesiastical association, possibly a church site or early religious enclosure. Whether the earthwork relates to that implied sacred geography is, for now, an open question.

Earthworks as a category cover considerable ground. The term can describe the raised banks of a ringfort, the collapsed walls of a cashel, the ditched perimeter of a ceremonial enclosure, or the eroded outline of a field system abandoned centuries ago. In Mayo, a county with dense early medieval settlement, such features are frequently the last surface trace of communities that farmed, worshipped, and organised themselves across the landscape long before any written record. Without further documentation it is not possible to say which of these the Knockatemple earthwork represents, how old it is, or what condition it is currently in.