The outer bank, standing about a metre high and thick with scrub growth, rings an inner bank half that height, which has been planted with coniferous trees. Between the two banks runs a fosse, the ditched channel that once added a further layer of difficulty for anyone approaching without an invitation. More trees occupy the centre of the raised interior. The overall effect is of a small, quietly fortified island in the middle of a working tillage field.

This is a rath, one of the thousands of earthwork ringforts scattered across Ireland, most of them built and occupied during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Raths were typically the farmsteads of free farming families, enclosed for the protection of livestock as much as people. The double-bank arrangement here, known as a bivallate ringfort, suggests the site may have belonged to someone of slightly higher social standing than average; more banks generally meant more labour to construct, and more labour implied more resources. Perhaps most intriguing is the possible presence of a souterrain beneath or within the interior. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, often associated with ringforts, and variously interpreted as a place for cool food storage, a refuge, or both. Whether the one at Lisladeen is intact or partially collapsed is not recorded with any certainty.