A bulldozer pushed what remained of the earthen bank into the fosse, the defensive ditch that had once encircled it, and the monument was effectively erased. It is the kind of loss that leaves almost nothing for a visitor to find, but the archaeological record of what stood there is specific enough to be worth understanding.

When surveyors visited the site in June 1984, they found a subcircular rath measuring roughly 39 metres east to west and 37.5 metres north to south. A rath is an earthen ringfort, typically dating from the early medieval period, constructed as an enclosed farmstead with a raised bank and surrounding ditch. At Lismafadda, the bank had already been poorly preserved by that point, but its outline could still be traced: an inner scarp, an intervening fosse, and traces of an outer bank running from the south around through the west to the northwest. At the north side, there was a causewayed entrance gap just over four metres wide, where the ditch had been bridged to allow access. Four years after that survey visit, all of it was gone. Associated with the site is a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, a place where unbaptised infants or others excluded from consecrated ground were laid to rest, often near ancient monuments or on marginal land. That feature survives as a separate recorded monument, and gives the site a layered significance that the levelling of the rath alone cannot entirely erase.