When a surveyor named Bowman visited in 1934, access to the site was refused by whoever held the land, leaving his account to rest on what could be observed or inferred from a distance. That brief, slightly frustrated note in the record is itself an unusual detail, a reminder that archaeology is not always a matter of excavation and discovery but sometimes of locked gates and polite refusals.

A ring barrow is a burial monument of prehistoric date, typically consisting of a low earthen mound enclosed by a circular bank and an outer ditch, known as a fosse. The example at Knockilly appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842, 1905, and 1937, each time rendered as a hachured circular enclosure with a diameter of roughly nineteen metres. Bowman described a single-ramparted mound standing about three and a half feet high, with a fosse that had, by his time, become largely filled in and sat inside rather than outside the rampart, which is an unusual arrangement worth noting. The consistency of the monument's appearance across nearly a century of mapping suggests it survived reasonably intact, at least to the eye, even if the ditch had silted and softened over the decades.

Because permission to inspect the site was refused when it was last formally approached, there is no close description of the monument's current condition or any account of what a visitor might expect to find on the ground today.