Knockglass is recorded as a village site, which places it among the many hundreds of communities across rural Ireland that were abandoned, cleared, or simply emptied out over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leaving little more than earthwork outlines, overgrown foundations, and a name that persists on maps long after the last inhabitant has gone.

Village sites of this kind are often the physical residue of Famine-era clearances or pre-Famine consolidation, when landlords reorganised their estates and displaced the clustered farming communities that had occupied the land under older rundale arrangements. Rundale was a system of shared, intermixed land-holding common in the west of Ireland, and the villages associated with it tended to be informal groupings of houses rather than planned settlements. When such communities were broken up, the buildings quickly fell, and the land was absorbed into grazing or larger tillage units. What remains at a site like Knockglass would typically include house platforms, lazy-bed ridges where crops were once grown, and sometimes the faint outlines of enclosures or pathways, all visible at low sun or from above, but easy to walk past at ground level without recognising what you are looking at.