Enclosures of this kind, which typically take the form of a roughly circular earthen bank or stone boundary defining a enclosed space, appear across Ireland in considerable numbers, and their purposes varied widely: some were domestic settlements, some ceremonial, some defensive. What draws attention to any individual example is usually what sets it apart from its neighbours, and Knocknahur holds its particulars close.

The townland name itself offers a small clue to the character of the place. Knocknahur derives from the Irish, most likely meaning something along the lines of the hill of the boundary or limit, which would sit neatly with the presence of a defined enclosure on the ground. Beyond that, the details of this particular site remain largely unexamined in any publicly available form, the kind of gap that is not unusual for the quieter corners of the Irish archaeological record, where fieldwork has been uneven and documentation is still catching up with the sheer density of monuments in the country.