The walls are modest in scale, roughly half a metre thick and not much more than forty centimetres high, and they would be easy to overlook in the surrounding pasture. What makes them quietly arresting is their arrangement: a straight wall running approximately 350 metres from northeast to southwest, with curvilinear walls curving away from each end toward the southeast, together enclosing a roughly semicircular area some 150 metres across at its widest. The geometry is deliberate, the product of people who understood this hillside and shaped it to their purposes.

These are relict field walls, meaning they are the remains of an agricultural system long since abandoned, their original ground surface preserved beneath and within the bog that gradually formed over them. Cutaway bog, where peat has been removed by cutting, has exposed portions of the walls that would otherwise remain hidden, offering an accidental cross-section through a buried landscape. The semicircular form of the enclosure, defined by that long linear boundary with its flanking curved arms, is characteristic of early field systems found across the west of Ireland, where communities divided hillslopes into workable plots for cultivation or grazing before the land was swallowed by blanket bog. The Knockanuha walls sit within a broader archaeological landscape in south-west Kerry, a region where the bog has both concealed and, through its cutting, gradually revealed the traces of earlier habitation and land use at a scale that is otherwise difficult to grasp.