Two further ringforts sit within roughly a hundred and two hundred metres to the west, meaning that anyone crossing this stretch of hilly Galway grassland is moving through what was once, in early medieval Ireland, a concentrated pocket of enclosed farmsteads. These enclosures, known variously as raths or ringforts, were the dominant settlement form of the period from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, each one typically housing a single farming family and their livestock within a raised earthen bank, sometimes reinforced with stone.

The Knockaloura example measures approximately 36.5 metres east to west and 34 metres north to south, making it a reasonably substantial subcircular enclosure. It is defined by two stone-lined earthen banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them, a double-bank arrangement that would have conferred both practical defence and a degree of social status on its original occupants. The entrance is well defined at the south-east. Inside the enclosure, a seven-metre oval hollow running on a north-west to south-east axis may be the collapsed remains of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber used in early medieval settlements for storage and, occasionally, as a place of refuge. Just outside the south-east of the bank, faint grassed-over foundation lines mark what appears to have been a small square stone structure, around four metres across, possibly a house. Later agricultural activity has left its own mark too; a field wall cuts across the monument at the north-east and south-south-east, a reminder that for many generations the site was simply part of a working landscape rather than a monument to be preserved.