What you are looking at, however, is an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, in which a circular bank and ditch defined the domestic space of a farming family and their livestock.

Known as Lismael on the 1922 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the rath forms a roughly circular enclosure measuring around 31 metres east to west and 27 metres north to south. Its defining earthwork varies as it goes around: a proper earthen bank, up to 4.4 metres wide, survives along the south and south-east, while elsewhere the boundary becomes a scarp, a sharp drop in the ground surface, reaching an external height of about 1.45 metres. Stones visible in the inner face of the bank on the south and south-south-west side may be what remains of an original stone revetment, a facing used to stabilise the earthwork. One of the more quietly interesting aspects of the site is the deliberate engineering evident in the eastern half, which appears to have been built up to compensate for a natural fall in the ground, so that the interior platform sits level regardless. Inside, faint traces of cultivation ridges cross the space on a north-east to south-west axis, suggesting the enclosure was put to agricultural use at some point after its original function had passed. In the north-east quadrant, a small hollow sits beside a cluster of three boulders, and nearby on the bank sits a small circular stone structure, roughly two metres in diameter, identified as a possible nineteenth-century lime kiln. Lime kilns were used to burn limestone into quicklime for spreading on fields, and their presence on or near older earthworks is not unusual in the Irish countryside, where later generations made practical use of whatever elevated ground or ready stone was at hand.