What gives it away, to an attentive eye, is the geometry: a raised sub-circular platform roughly 45 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west, encircled by a low earthen bank and a shallow external fosse, the term for the ditch that typically runs around the outside of such enclosures. This is a rath, the Irish word commonly used for a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was built and occupied across Ireland primarily during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Several thousand survive across the country in varying states of preservation, but each one carries its own particular character and situation.

At Knockatee, the bank is best preserved along the northern, eastern, and south-eastern arc, where it still reads as a distinct boundary feature. Elsewhere it has been reduced to a scarp, a low slope where the original structure has worn down over centuries of weather and agricultural pressure. Inside the enclosure, traces of cultivation ridges run roughly west-north-west to east-south-east across the interior, a reminder that this ground has been worked and reworked long after whoever first raised the bank had gone. A field fence running east to west now bisects the northern half of the monument, a practical division that has little regard for the earlier one. Another ringfort lies approximately 100 metres to the south, which is not unusual; paired or clustered ringforts appear across the Irish landscape and may reflect family or community groupings occupying adjacent enclosures over time. The hillock offers clear views from the north-west around to the north-east, a positioning that seems unlikely to have been accidental.