The ground is level, the grass unremarkable, and whatever once rose here has been absorbed back into the land. Yet aerial photographs tell a different story: the ghostly outlines of a double rectangular platform, its surrounding ditches just faintly legible from the air, preserving the shape of something that was once, by any measure, an unusual structure.

The antiquarian T.J. Westropp, writing between 1917 and 1919, described what he called a "curious platform fort" consisting of two rectangular platforms arranged in a north-south line, each standing between 1.5 and 1.8 metres high and roughly 20 metres wide, with a fosse, meaning a defensive ditch, some 3.6 metres wide separating them and another encircling the whole. The northern platform measured around 21 metres in length, the southern about 16.5 metres. By Westropp's time the fosses were already nearly filled in, and the north-western corner of the upper platform had been levelled. The site sits approximately 30 metres north-east of a nearby ringfort, a circular enclosure of the early medieval period, and was later classified by T.B. Barry in 1981 as a moated site, a category of monument typically associated with Anglo-Norman settlement, where a raised platform or island was surrounded by a water-filled ditch. The combination of rectangular platforms and a possible moated arrangement makes Knocklong West a hybrid that resists easy categorisation.

By 1968, when an oblique aerial photograph was taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, the northern platform survived only as a rectangular shape defined by its fosse rather than any upstanding bank. Today even that trace has gone from ground level, lost to agricultural improvement. The site is recorded on the Sites and Monuments Record for County Limerick, and aerial imagery, including the 1968 CUCAP photograph and later ortho-images, remains the primary way of reading the layout. Visitors to the area would find nothing to distinguish this particular patch of pasture from any other, which is, in its own way, part of what makes the record of what once stood here worth knowing about.