That battle, known as the Battle of Knockdoe, was among the largest conflicts fought on Irish soil in the period, and the hill of Knocktuagh, sometimes called Knockdoe or Knockdoebeg, sits quietly in the landscape as the named location of that event, with little ceremony to mark it.

The engagement of 1504 pitted Gerald Fitzgerald, the eighth Earl of Kildare, acting as Lord Deputy of Ireland on behalf of the English Crown, against Ulick Burke, the Earl of Clanrickard. The battle, by local tradition, was fought across the ground between this hill and Turloughmore, roughly 1.5 kilometres to the north-east. The physical evidence left behind is modest but tangible. Writing in 1910, a chronicler named Holt recorded that some musket balls and one cannon ball had been found on the side of the hill, fragments of an engagement that involved thousands of men and helped consolidate Kildare's authority across Connacht. Alongside the battle site, the same OS map records a small circular enclosure near the hill, surviving today as a low circular mound roughly ten metres in diameter and one metre in height, a form typical of early medieval ringfort construction and a reminder that this landscape was occupied and contested long before 1504.

The site sits in scrubland on a north-facing slope, and the mound, though low, is visible on the ground. The battlefield itself is unmarked in any formal sense, and the area between the hill and Turloughmore to the north-east, where tradition places the fighting, is open countryside. The cannon ball and musket finds recorded by Holt are the closest thing to confirmed physical evidence, and they have long since left the hillside.