To a passing glance it might read as a scrubby copse or an odd field feature, but the shape, too deliberate and too round, gives it away. This is a ringfort, or rath, the kind of enclosed homestead that would have housed an early medieval Irish farming family, probably sometime between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The earthen bank that encircles it once marked the boundary between a family's domestic space and the wider, less controlled world outside.

By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded the area in 1840, the site was already depicted on the six-inch map as a circular enclosure roughly forty metres across, sitting on the north-western boundary of what was then a working farmstead. The relationship between the ancient ringfort and that historic farm boundary is one of those small continuities that Irish landscapes quietly preserve. The 1897 twenty-five-inch edition showed the enclosure more precisely, with exterior dimensions of approximately thirty-six metres north to south and thirty-four metres east to west, and noted a field boundary running just one to two metres outside the embankment on the northern, eastern, and southern sides. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected the site in 2000, they recorded an interior diameter of around thirty metres, an earthen bank roughly four metres wide, and no visible external fosse, the term for the ditch that often accompanies such banks. The internal rise was modest, only about forty centimetres, though the exterior face of the bank stood a more pronounced one-and-a-third metres.

Access to the site is limited. By 2000 the interior was densely overgrown, with entry only practicable from the western side. Google Earth images taken in 2018 and 2020 confirm the monument is still legible from above as a circular tree-covered earthwork, with the north-western quadrant particularly visible as a tree line against the surrounding fields. Another enclosure, recorded separately, lies roughly 325 metres to the north, which suggests this part of Knockanes once held a degree of early settlement activity that the current landscape gives little indication of. Anyone visiting should expect rough going underfoot and limited views of the bank from inside; the clearest sense of the structure's shape comes from distance or from aerial imagery rather than from standing within it.