A rath, as this type of monument is more properly called, was typically a circular enclosure of earth and stone used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1200 AD. Most Irish raths were home to a single farming family, the surrounding bank and ditch serving as much as a marker of status as a defensive barrier. At Knockanour, that social geometry survives in the ground, if only just.

The enclosure measures roughly 29 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west internally, surrounded by a bank of earth and stone that still stands around two metres high on its outer face at the north, though it is considerably lower on the inside. Along the top of that bank, wall footings about half a metre wide are clearly visible, suggesting the earthen bank was once capped or faced with stone. On the western half the bank is well preserved; on the eastern side it has degraded and been broken down. A possible fosse, the term for a defensive ditch cut around an enclosure, appears as a shallow depression outside the bank to the north-west and north, accompanied by a low outer stone bank. The base of the knoll on the south has been scarped, cut back where a roughly east-west road now runs, so the site has not entirely escaped the attentions of later centuries. Inside, the southwest quadrant contains what may be the remains of a rectangular house, and immediately to its north a trapezoidal depression roughly five metres across suggests further internal structures. A loose mound of stone in the eastern half of the interior is most likely the product of relatively recent field clearance rather than anything ancient. The whole site, perimeter and interior alike, is covered in overgrowth.