The site survives as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly signature that appears in aerial photographs when buried earthworks cause overlying grass or grain to grow at slightly different rates, tracing out shapes invisible at field level. In this case, the cropmark outlines a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter, with a bank and an external fosse, the fosse being the defensive ditch that typically surrounded these early medieval farmsteads.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined primarily by earthen banks rather than stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They served as enclosed farmsteads rather than military fortifications, the bank and ditch marking the boundary of a family's living and working space. What makes Knockbarry particularly striking is its setting within a cluster of related monuments. A circular enclosure lies approximately seventy metres to the north-north-west, a second ringfort sits around one hundred and fifty metres to the south-west, and a further earthwork is recorded about one hundred and sixty metres to the west. Whatever was happening at Knockbarry in the early medieval period, this was not an isolated household on a lonely hillside but part of a landscape that was evidently well settled and organised.