It reads, to an untrained eye, as a slight thickening in the grass, a modest disturbance in the earth. Yet the dimensions, roughly six metres east to west and three metres north to south, with traces of a wall or stony bank on three sides and an opening to the east, are consistent with a small domestic building of the kind that once clustered within and around the defended enclosures of early medieval Ireland.

The structure sits within a rath, a type of circular or roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically defined by a bank and ditch, that served as a farmstead and status symbol for farming families across Ireland from roughly the early Christian period onward. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, and it was not uncommon for subsidiary structures, animal pens, storage buildings, or modest dwellings, to be placed inside them or hard against their interior edges. The Knockanour example occupies the south-western quadrant of one such enclosure. Immediately to the north of the rectangular structure lies a trapezoidal depression, approximately five metres in each direction and half a metre deep, its shape narrowing slightly toward the north. To the west of that sits a further poorly defined rectangular feature of similar proportions to the first. What purpose these adjacent features served, whether they were ancillary structures, yard spaces, or something else entirely, remains unclear. No date has been established for any of them.