To be listed as a monument without a known period of construction is to occupy an unusual category, somewhere between archaeology and architecture, old enough to warrant formal recording but not yet dated with any confidence.

Knocaloura is a townland in the west of Ireland, and the house recorded there joins a long tradition of rural domestic structures that resist easy classification. Ireland has many thousands of such buildings, ranging from late medieval tower house dependencies to post-medieval vernacular dwellings, and without excavation or detailed survey it is often impossible to assign a century, let alone a decade, to a roofless or ruined structure in an agricultural landscape. The designation "indeterminate date" is not a failure of record-keeping so much as an honest acknowledgement that the evidence has not yet been gathered or interpreted.