Inside a ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure of early medieval date typically defended by earthen banks and ditches, you would not ordinarily expect to find another raised circular platform at the centre. Here, however, a natural mound some twenty metres across sits within the enclosed space, and on top of that mound someone built their huts. The effect is a kind of accidental layering: landscape, then human engineering, then landscape again, then human habitation once more.

The site carries two names, Lisnarahardin in anglicised form and Lios na Rátha Áirde in Irish, and it belongs to the bivallate class of rath, meaning it was defended by two concentric banks rather than one. The inner bank still rises 3.5 metres above the base of the fosse, the ditch that separates the two banks, and the drystone revetment visible on the inner flanks of both banks suggests the builders were reinforcing the earthwork faces with carefully laid stonework. The original entrance faces south, a 4.1-metre gap through the inner bank aligned with a 7-metre causeway across the fosse, and the detail is preserved carefully enough that three stones on the western side of the gap and a single upright stone on the eastern side still frame it. A secondary gap at the north-north-east is a later intrusion. Inside, the stony banks on the central mound appear to mark the footprints of three or possibly four huts, though only two are measured with any confidence: one roughly oval structure of 5.7 by 3.5 metres internally, its own entrance also facing south and so aligned with the ringfort entrance below it, and a smaller rectangular hut of 3.5 by 2.8 metres tucked against the eastern bank. The site also reportedly contained a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, though this feature is noted only from older sources and is not described in detail. Much of the outer bank has since been absorbed into modern field boundaries and is considerably damaged, particularly to the south, where a field fence has replaced the bank and subsequently been removed as well, leaving a landscape of layered disturbance that is itself a kind of record.