Labelled on the Ordnance Survey Ireland 25-inch map as 'Knocklong fort', it is circular in plan and modest in scale, yet its proportions are precise enough to have drawn genuine admiration from one of Ireland's most thorough antiquarians.

Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing between 1917 and 1919, identified this as the finest of a cluster of motes in the area and described it in some detail. A mote, in this context, is the earthen mound at the centre of a motte-and-bailey castle, a form of fortification introduced to Ireland by the Normans in the twelfth century, though the term was used loosely by early antiquarians and the precise origins of individual mounds are not always clear. Westropp recorded the mound as standing between thirteen and fifteen feet high above its fosse, with a flat summit between forty and forty-five feet across and a base diameter of seventy feet. He noted thick hawthorn growing on the south-eastern side and described the fosse, the defensive ditch encircling the mound, as sixteen feet wide at the bottom. His most telling observation may be the plainest: 'a beautiful outlook to the Galtees and Slievereagh', which suggests the elevated position was deliberate and strategic, a common feature of such monuments.

The mound sits approximately 120 metres north of a local road and is today heavily overgrown, a fact confirmed by aerial imagery. Two field boundaries now cut across it, one running north to south on the eastern side and another running northwest to southeast along the south, which means the monument has been partly absorbed into the modern agricultural landscape. Visiting in anything but dry conditions is likely to make the surrounding ground difficult, and the wet fosse Westropp described suggests the site retains moisture readily. The monument is not signposted and requires some effort to locate on the ground, but for those with an interest in earthwork archaeology, the site's preservation of its original proportions, despite the encroaching hedgerows and field divisions, makes it an instructive example of how such structures endure.