Geologically they are unremarkable, entirely natural erratics of the kind scattered across Connacht. But local tradition holds that they are bullauns, a term for stones bearing artificial cup-shaped hollows that are typically associated with early Christian sites and sometimes credited with curative or ritual properties. The stones at Knockaloura have no such hollows; they are plain boulders. And yet the belief persists, which says something interesting about how the landscape around a ringfort tends to accumulate meaning over centuries, drawing natural features into its orbit.

The earthwork at the centre of this local geography is a circular rath, a type of enclosed farmstead common across Ireland from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. This one sits on a prominent rise above surrounding low-lying grassland, which would have made it both defensible and conspicuous. It measures 31.5 metres in diameter and is defined by two earthen banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. The inner bank has been quarried away on the northern and eastern sides, leaving only an irregular scarp where cut earth meets the slope, but the outer bank and fosse survive reasonably well from the south-southwest around through the west to the north. An entrance gap opens to the east, which was a common orientation for raths, and a small hollow sits inside the interior, possibly the remnant of a structure or simply the product of centuries of surface disturbance.

The condition described as fair reflects the reality of many such sites in agricultural landscapes: enough survives to read the original form clearly, but the quarrying of the inner bank is a reminder of how routinely these earthworks were mined for material or simply worn down by generations of farming. The association of the two surrounding boulders with bullaun stones, despite the absence of the defining characteristic, suggests the rath long held enough local significance to draw folklore to the stones nearest to it.