The bank that once defined it as a distinct enclosure has been pressed into service as part of the local field fence system, reinforced with stone facing in places, so that the boundary between ancient monument and modern farmland has effectively dissolved. A few large stones embedded in the bank, both on the inside and outside, may predate all of that repurposing entirely.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement that was built and occupied across Ireland primarily during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts were typically the homesteads of farming families, their circular earthen banks and ditches providing a degree of security for people and livestock rather than any serious military defence. At Knockane, the enclosure follows the contour of an east-west ridge, with its interior sloping down toward the north. On the eastern to south-western arc, the boundary takes the form of a raised earthen bank standing about 1.4 metres on the interior face, with an external fosse, a ditch, cut to around a metre in depth. Where the fosse gives way elsewhere around the circuit, a scarp of roughly 1.2 metres takes over. At the base of that scarp, a small V-shaped depression has been cut by a stream making its way downhill, adding a further layer of incidental shaping to a site that has already been reworked by centuries of agricultural use.

The interior today is heavily overgrown with furze and briars, which is common enough for ringforts that have passed out of any active use. That dense growth, combined with the bank's incorporation into field boundaries, means the site reads more as a thicketed corner of pasture than as anything obviously archaeological. The ridge setting, though, gives some sense of why the location was chosen in the first place, sitting as it does with a long northward view across sloping ground.