The earthwork at Gloves is easy to walk past without registering what it is, a grass-covered mound barely a metre high, its edges falling away in a gentle slope rather than the sharp drop you might expect from something built to define a boundary and announce a presence. That subtlety is partly the work of centuries, and partly the nature of the thing itself.

A rath, or ringfort, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches, used throughout early medieval Ireland as a farmstead and the protected residence of a family of some local standing. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The example at Gloves was recorded on the 1933 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular enclosure of approximately 45 metres in diameter, and Cody, writing in 1989, described it as a low grass-covered mound delimited by a gently sloping edge. What gives it a particular local character is its name. The site was known in the area as a "Lisheen", a diminutive derived from the Irish "lios", one of the common words for a ringfort, with the diminutive suffix lending it a quality that is affectionate rather than dismissive, the small lios, the little enclosure.