It is the kind of detail that does not register in a landscape photograph but that brings a site into focus as a place where people worked. This rath, a ringfort defined by an earthen bank rather than stone walls, sits on a south-west-facing slope at Lissacresig in mid Cork, its interior looking out over the Sullane River valley.

The enclosure is nearly circular, measuring approximately 48.5 metres east to west and 44.2 metres north to south. The inner bank still rises to around 2.55 metres in places, and the fosse, the external ditch that accompanied most Irish ringforts as part of their defensive and symbolic boundary, reaches a depth of 3.1 metres. A counterscarp, the low outer lip of the ditch, survives along part of the southern and western arc. Because the site occupies a hillslope, the builders raised the interior ground level on the downhill side to keep it roughly level, which explains why the bank appears much lower, barely 0.2 metres, when measured from inside on the south-west. The original entrance, 2.5 metres wide, opened to the east via a causeway across the fosse, though a collapsed stone wall now blocks it; a secondary gap, one metre wide, opens to the north-west. The interior still carries the faint corrugations of old cultivation ridges running on a north-south axis, along with two low cairns of field-clearance stones gathered to one side, the residue of someone trying to make the enclosed ground arable. A laneway follows the outside of the enclosure to the north and east, kept apart from the fosse by a stone-faced earthen bank. Just to the north, visible from within the fort, a standing stone occupies an adjacent field, a reminder that this particular patch of landscape was being marked out and used across a very long span of time.