The enclosure tapers from roughly 31 metres across at its northern end down to about 12 metres at the south, giving it an unusual wedge-like plan defined by a scarp, the term for an earthen slope or bank that marks the boundary of such a site. It measures approximately 56 metres along its north-south axis, modest in scale but distinctive enough in form that it caught the attention of the first Ordnance Survey mappers working through this part of Kilkenny in 1839, who recorded it by name, and again on the revised edition of 1900.

The name Knockaunteemeade, retained on both those nineteenth-century maps, suggests a place that carried some local significance long before the surveyors arrived. The landscape around it is quietly clustered with archaeology: a large enclosure lies roughly 200 metres to the north-east, and another sits about 300 metres to the east-north-east, hinting that this corner of Clara parish may have been a focal point of some kind in earlier centuries. Perhaps most intriguing is the detail that the Ordnance Survey maps also mark a mineral spa well approximately 75 metres to the south-west. Spa wells, which were typically springs with iron-rich or otherwise mineralised water, attracted considerable attention in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when taking the waters was both a fashionable cure and a social occasion. Whether the well and the earthwork were ever connected in use or meaning is not recorded, but their proximity in this small, overlooked townland is the kind of detail that tends to linger.