The summit is compact, roughly oval in shape, measuring around eleven metres east to west and seven metres north to south, and defined along its southern edge by a faint scarp, a low step in the ground no more than half a metre high. That scarp is subtle enough to be mistaken for a natural quirk of the landscape, yet it traces the kind of deliberately bounded space that suggests human intention at some point in the past. The site has been catalogued as a possible enclosure, which means it may represent the remains of an early settlement boundary or enclosed area, though the evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive.

The name itself offers a thread to follow. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and 1920 both record the place as Knockaunawaddra, while Tim Robinson's 1977 map of the area gives the Irish form, Cnocán an Mhadra, meaning the little hill of the dog. Whether that name preserves a memory of some practical use, a local landmark for herders or hunters, or something older and less easily explained, is not recorded. Nearby, the 1897 twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey plan marks a lime kiln, by then already disused, about sixty-eight metres to the northeast. Lime kilns were used across rural Ireland to burn limestone and produce quicklime for spreading on acidic bogland soils, so its presence here points to a period when this sodden ground was being actively worked and improved. Immediately to the west of the hillock, old cultivation ridges are still faintly visible, another trace of that agricultural effort laid over the bog.