It sits in pasture, a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across, ringed by an earthen bank still standing some two and a half metres high. Inside, a planting of coniferous trees has taken hold over the years, giving the interior a rather different atmosphere from the open farmland around it. Beneath the surface, there may be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind early medieval farmers used for storage or refuge, though its presence here is recorded only as a possibility.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was the standard enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Most were home to a single family and their livestock, the surrounding bank offering a degree of protection and a clear marker of territory. The Knockrour example appears to have had more than one such bank at some point. Writing in 1939, P. J. Hartnett noted vague traces of a second outer bank, which would have made this a bivallate fort, a slightly more elaborate form sometimes associated with higher-status occupants. Whether those traces are still legible on the ground today is another matter. What remains certain is that whoever farmed this patch of Cork countryside in the early medieval period was not alone in doing so; a second ringfort stands just thirty metres to the north-east, close enough to suggest these two enclosures were part of the same small community, perhaps belonging to related families working adjacent land at roughly the same time.