Before the trees came down, the circular forms beneath them were entirely obscured; it was the harvesting itself, carried out around mid-2018, that revealed the outlines. The circles are now defined not by earthworks or stonework in the conventional sense, but by the stumps of the felled trees, which follow the arcs of the underlying features with enough regularity to suggest something deliberate lies beneath the ground.

Enclosures of this kind, in Irish archaeology, typically refer to roughly circular or oval areas defined by a bank, ditch, or wall, and they can date from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period. They served a wide range of purposes, from domestic settlement to ritual use, and many survive as earthworks beneath agricultural land or, as here, beneath plantation forestry. The particular circumstances at Knockawaddra are a reminder that commercial forestry, for all the damage it can do to buried archaeology through ploughing and root disturbance, occasionally acts as an accidental preservative layer, keeping a site undisturbed until the trees are removed. Whether the features here represent genuine archaeological enclosures or a coincidence of tree planting patterns is a question the available information does not resolve; they are recorded as possible enclosures rather than confirmed ones.