What exists is a cropmark, a ghostly outline that appeared in an aerial photograph taken in July 1989, revealing the buried fosse of a roughly circular enclosure measuring around twenty-five metres in diameter. A fosse is simply a ditch, in this case one that once defined the boundary of the enclosure, and though it has long since filled in and vanished beneath the soil, the differential growth of crops above it gave the whole thing away from the air.

Cropmarks form when buried features such as ditches or pits cause the vegetation above them to grow differently from the surrounding ground, typically taller and greener over filled-in ditches where moisture and organic material collect. A circular enclosure of this kind and size is a common enough monument type in the Irish landscape, broadly comparable to a ringfort, the remains of an enclosed farmstead or settlement that might date anywhere from the early medieval period onward. At Knockanare, without excavation, it is impossible to say more than that: the cropmark records the shape and approximate scale of whatever once stood here, and not a great deal else.