The circle itself is complete, which is rarer than it might seem, and its five uprights, known as orthostats, range from one to nearly two metres in length and stand up to about ninety centimetres high. The whole interior, measured along the main axis, spans just four metres, making this an intimate rather than imposing construction.

The monument occupies a small moorland plateau at the south-western end of the Boggeragh Mountains, with the valley of the Foherish River opening out to the west below it. Its main axis runs north-east to south-west, an alignment that recurs across many of Cork's prehistoric stone circles and is generally associated with astronomical sightlines, most often the rising or setting of the sun at significant points in the year. What makes Knockraheen particularly worth attention is its immediate neighbourhood. A pair of standing stones lies roughly twenty-two metres to the south-west. Some seventy metres to the south-east sits a radial-stone cairn, a burial mound edged with stones set like spokes around a hub. A further hundred and twenty metres to the north-east, another pair of standing stones accompanies three more cairns. Seán Ó Nualláin, who catalogued Cork's stone circles systematically in the early 1980s, recorded this site as number sixty-two in his survey, published in 1984.

The plateau setting means the circle is exposed to weather from most directions, and the moorland approach reflects that. Visitors who make the effort will find a genuinely intact monument surrounded by companion structures still visible in the rough ground, each element of the complex quietly reinforcing the sense that this corner of mid-Cork was, at some point in prehistory, a place of considerable organised purpose.