An ancient enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or curving earthwork that appears in great numbers across the Irish countryside, once traced an arc of bank some forty metres across, running from west-southwest to northeast along the three-hundred-foot contour of the landscape. Today, a modern farm building occupies the spot. The ground gives nothing away.

The 1905 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map still shows the arc of bank as it was at the turn of the twentieth century, which tells us the enclosure survived, at least in partial form, into the era of systematic mapping. By 1982, when the site was visited by Cahill, it had already been levelled, the earthwork absorbed into improved pasture and the slight natural depression it sat within. Enclosures of this type are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, often interpreted as the remains of early medieval farmsteads or stock enclosures, their raised banks long since flattened by generations of drainage, ploughing, and agricultural improvement. At Knockkelly, the process reached its conclusion with the construction of a farm building directly on the monument's footprint.