What survives of Lissybroder's ancient ringfort is little more than a faint arc of earthwork, a scarp and a shallow ditch curving from the south-east around to the west, the rest of the circuit having vanished so completely that no surface trace remains. It is the kind of site that rewards patience more than spectacle.

A rath, in its original form, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used throughout the early medieval period in Ireland primarily as a defended farmstead. The Lissybroder example, approximately 33 metres in diameter, conforms to that basic type. Locally it has long been known as 'Lissawavra', a name recorded as early as 1914 by Neary, which suggests the site carried enough presence in folk memory to earn its own identity even as the physical fabric eroded. The 'liss' element of that name is itself telling, being an anglicisation of the Irish lios, a common term for a ringfort enclosure. The external fosse, a defensive ditch dug around the outside of the bank, is still partially legible along the southern and western arcs, and the scarp, the sloping face of the original earthen bank, traces a similar course. These are quiet details, easy to overlook in a working field.