The bank, barely half a metre high, traces a near-perfect circle roughly thirty metres across, and a road skirts its western edge. Easy to overlook from a car window, it is the kind of feature that rewards a slower pace and a certain willingness to read the landscape.

The site is tentatively identified as a ringfort, or rath, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the fifth to the twelfth century. Ringforts usually consist of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, enclosing a space where a family would have lived and kept livestock. The earthwork at Knockalinsky fits that general profile, though the qualifier "possibly" attached to its classification is a reminder that low, eroded earthworks can be ambiguous, and a definitive identification would require more thorough investigation. The site was recorded in a 1994 archaeological survey of Ballinrobe and its surrounding district, which also took in the landscapes around Lough Mask and Lough Carra, an area whose quiet farmland contains more archaeological traces than its surface suggests.