The Ordnance Survey, which mapped Ireland with considerable thoroughness across the nineteenth century and catalogued antiquities as it went, passed over this site entirely. It took an aeroplane and a camera in 1986 to reveal what centuries of ground-level observation had missed: a roughly circular area approximately forty metres in diameter, its outline preserved in a bank thick enough to have attracted tree growth, sitting quietly on a north-facing slope in County Limerick.

The discovery came through the Bruff aerial photographic survey, which logged the site as Bruff 102 (AP 4/3677). Aerial survey is particularly effective at finding monuments like this one, because features that are invisible or ambiguous at ground level can resolve clearly from above, especially where differences in vegetation growth, soil moisture, or subtle earthwork relief create readable patterns. An enclosure, in the Irish archaeological sense, typically refers to a defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, or wall, and can date from anywhere across several millennia; without excavation, the precise age and function of the Knockballyfookeen example remain open questions. What the survey confirmed was its general shape and the presence of that tree-covered bank. A second enclosure, recorded separately, lies approximately 214 metres to the southwest, suggesting this part of the landscape may have seen repeated or sustained activity at some point in the past. The site sits 147 metres west of the Reask River, which serves as the townland boundary with Cross, and 68 metres southeast of the boundary with Brackyle.

The enclosure lies in pasture, and its physical presence on the ground today is subtle at best. By November 2018, when a Google Earth orthoimage was taken, only a partial outline remained legible, showing as a curving field boundary rather than anything obviously ancient. Anyone hoping to locate it should expect to work from map coordinates rather than visible earthworks, and should bear in mind that the land is agricultural. The aerial photograph remains the clearest record of the monument's full form, and the Bruff survey image showing the cropmark labelled Bruff 102 is the most useful reference for understanding what survives beneath the pasture.