Today, only one remains upright. The other three were knocked down in the early 1990s and now lie piled together at the north-eastern end of the row, their original arrangement reduced to a kind of accidental cairn.

Stone rows, alignments of two or more standing stones set out in a straight line, are found across Cork and Kerry in particular, and are generally understood to date to the Bronze Age, though their precise purpose remains genuinely uncertain. At Knocknanagh, the four stones were aligned northeast to southwest over a total length of 7.4 metres, with spacing that increased markedly toward the southwestern end. The three smaller stones measured between 0.3 and 0.55 metres in height, set roughly a metre apart from one another. The fourth and largest stone, positioned 2.4 metres further along to the southwest, stands 1.3 metres high and is considerably more substantial than its companions. This graduation in size, smaller stones at one end building toward a taller terminal stone, is a pattern recognised in other Cork and Kerry alignments and catalogued by the archaeologist Seán Ó Nualláin in his 1988 survey of the type.

What makes Knocknanagh quietly dispiriting is the contrast between how carefully this monument was set out, and how casually it was dismantled. The surviving southwest stone gives some sense of what the alignment once looked like, but the three collapsed stones, bundled at its far end, tell the more recent story.