Ring barrows are among the more understated features of the Irish prehistoric record: a central burial mound enclosed by a ditch and an outer bank, the whole arrangement typically no more than a dozen or so metres across. They are easy to walk past without recognising what you are looking at, which is part of what makes them worth pausing over.

The place name itself offers a small clue to the character of the area. Knockatemple derives from the Irish for "hill of the church" or "hill of the temple", suggesting a landscape that accumulated layers of ritual significance across different periods, prehistoric and early Christian uses of the same ground overlapping in ways that were probably not accidental. Ring barrows are generally associated with the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 500 BC, when the construction of earthen burial monuments was common across Ireland and Britain. The specific history of this example at Knockatemple, its excavation history if any, its dimensions, and any finds associated with it, remain unrecorded in publicly available sources at present.