The only record of it comes from the air, where a circular pattern in a field betrays something buried beneath. In aerial photography, buried ditches and other ancient features sometimes show up as cropmarks, variations in the colour or height of growing crops caused by differences in soil moisture and composition above filled-in earthworks. The ground itself holds no visible trace; the geometry only becomes legible from above.

The cropmark at Knockanare outlines the fosse, or enclosing ditch, of a ring-ditch roughly twenty metres in diameter, with a smaller annexe visible on its northern side. Ring-ditches of this kind are generally understood to be the ploughed-down remnants of prehistoric burial monuments, often Bronze Age round barrows whose mounded earth has long since been levelled by centuries of agriculture. The site was captured in a photograph taken in July 1989 as part of a systematic aerial survey programme, and was subsequently recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Volume 4, covering the north of the county, published in 2000. The presence of the annexe on the north side is a detail worth noting; such secondary enclosures are not uncommon in this class of monument, though their precise function is rarely straightforward to interpret without excavation.

There is little for a visitor to see at ground level, which is in some ways the point. The landscape at Knockanare carries something entirely invisible to anyone walking it, a buried geometry that only reveals itself under particular conditions of light, crop, and altitude.