That cartographic half-truth is itself a small clue to the site's subsequent history: at some point after the map was made, the northwestern section of the earthen bank was cut back and the material apparently used to fill in the external fosse, clearing the way for agricultural access into the field. The result is a monument that looks, at its western edge where the bank dissolves into the roadside field boundary, slightly flattened and domesticated, as though the past has been quietly tidied away.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they are primarily earthen in construction, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. They were built by farmers and local lords alike, and tens of thousands once dotted the Irish countryside. The Knockanree example is a fairly modest specimen: an almost circular enclosure measuring 32.7 metres across on its northwest to southeast axis, defined by an earthen bank between four and six and a half metres wide. Internally the bank stands between one and one and a half metres high; externally, between one and a half and one point eight metres. Around the outside runs a fosse, which is simply a ditch, here three metres wide and half a metre deep. The northeastern stretch of the bank retains a near-vertical outer face, which gives some sense of how the whole circuit may once have looked before later agricultural use began to soften and interrupt it. The interior slopes gently from southeast to northwest, following the natural lie of the land on this northwest-facing slope, and no trace of an original entrance or any internal features has been identified.