Not through excavation, not through any dramatic act, but through the gradual and unremarked levelling that quietly erases hundreds of early medieval sites across the Irish countryside every generation. Aerial photography shows no surviving trace of it now, which places this particular site in a melancholy category of monuments that are easier to describe in the past tense than the present.

When it was surveyed, the Lissoy ringfort was a sub-circular enclosure roughly 36 metres across at its widest, sitting on a slight natural rise in gently undulating grassland with open views in several directions. A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead from the early medieval period, typically dating from between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and defined by one or more earthen banks with an accompanying fosse, the shallow external ditch that provided the material for the bank itself. Here, the outer bank was already poorly preserved at the time of survey, reduced in places on the eastern side to little more than a scarp, a low slope where the original bank had slumped or been worn away. What made this example somewhat unusual was the presence of internal divisions: low earthen banks between one and two metres wide partitioned the interior into three uneven areas, suggesting a more complex domestic arrangement than the single open enclosure typical of the form. A second ringfort stood approximately 200 metres to the south-west, a pairing that is not uncommon in the Irish landscape, where neighbouring farmsteads sometimes clustered within sight of one another.