The cattle have moved in, the ditch has silted up on the eastern side, and the place carries on being used, just not for anything its builders would recognise. This example at Lissava sits just below the brow of a hill in gently undulating Tipperary pasture, the ground falling away to the east, and it survives well enough to reward a careful look.

Ringforts, known in the Irish tradition as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its outbuildings within an earthen bank and external ditch. The Lissava example is roughly circular, measuring about 38.8 metres north to south and 43.8 metres east to west. The enclosing bank is substantial, nearly ten metres wide at its base and rising almost two metres on the outer face, though the interior slope is much gentler, giving the inside a slightly concave, bowl-like quality. Outside the bank runs a flat-bottomed fosse, the ditch that would originally have ringed the whole enclosure; it measures about two and a half metres wide and a metre deep where it survives intact. On the western side this fosse is in the best condition. To the east and south-east it has been infilled over time, and the inner face of the bank shows some erosion from cattle pressure in the southern quadrant. An original entrance, or at least a formal crossing point, is still legible as a causeway seven metres wide in the western quadrant. Inside the enclosure, faint traces of lazy beds, the ridge-and-furrow pattern left by spade cultivation, suggest the interior was turned over to tillage at some point after the fort's defensive or domestic function had passed.