It does not appear on any historic Ordnance Survey Ireland maps. It was invisible in aerial photographs taken between 2005 and 2013. It briefly ghosted into view on a Google Earth image captured in March 2017, then vanished again by November 2018. The only reason anyone knows it exists at all is because a plane flew over this particular patch of ground in 1986 and caught it at exactly the right moment.

That aerial survey, conducted as part of the Bruff aerial photographic survey and logged as Bruff 94 (AP 4/3672), recorded a circular enclosure measuring approximately 29 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west. Enclosures of this kind are broadly understood as enclosed areas defined by a bank, ditch, or both, and they can represent anything from early medieval farmsteads to ceremonial or funerary sites, though their function in any given case is rarely straightforward to determine. What makes the Knockballyfookeen example particularly interesting is its setting and its company. Roughly 30 metres to the north-east lies a ring-barrow, a low circular mound typically associated with prehistoric burial. Sixty metres to the west sits a ringfort known as Rathaniska, a type of enclosed settlement common across early medieval Ireland. The enclosure sits 60 metres east of the townland boundary with Ballyshoneen, which places it in a landscape that has clearly seen a long and layered pattern of occupation, even if the ground itself gives little away.

Visiting requires some patience and a tolerance for soft ground. The site lies in wet pasture, which means the terrain can be heavy going depending on the season, and there is nothing visible at ground level to orient yourself by. The enclosure's intermittent appearance in aerial and satellite imagery suggests it is a crop or soil mark, becoming legible only when particular conditions of moisture or vegetation growth reveal the buried features beneath. Anyone hoping to photograph it from above would do well to consult recent satellite imagery before travelling, since the site may or may not be visible depending on when the image was taken. Rathaniska to the west is the more readily identifiable landmark in the area, and the ring-barrow to the north-east, compiled and uploaded to the record by Edmond O'Donovan in September 2020, offers a further point of reference for those working from map data.