The site sits in reclaimed pasture roughly 180 metres east of the townland boundary with Ballynamona, and it went unnoticed by conventional survey for generations, its outline absorbed into the working landscape of drainage ditches and field margins.

The enclosure was identified by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland from aerial photographs taken on 18 September 2005. What the camera revealed was a sub-rectangular enclosure, that is, a roughly rectangular but slightly irregular outline, a shape common in Irish prehistoric and early medieval landscape features. Enclosures of this kind could have served any number of purposes, from settlement and stock management to ritual use, and without excavation it is not possible to say more precisely what this one was. What makes the Lissard example particularly interesting is its proximity to a substantial group of fourteen barrows, low earthen burial mounds, recorded about 150 metres to the south. Barrows are among the more recognisable monuments of prehistoric Ireland, and a cluster of fourteen in one area suggests this part of County Limerick held considerable significance at some point in the distant past. That the enclosure sits so close to them, and yet was entirely absent from Ordnance Survey historic mapping, points to how selectively the landscape gives up its evidence.

On the ground today the enclosure is not dramatically visible. Its outline is defined partly by existing field boundaries on the southern and western sides, and by drainage ditches on the northern and eastern sides, meaning the modern agricultural landscape has effectively fossilised the shape without anyone necessarily realising it. Google Earth orthoimages, the overhead photographic layers available through the mapping platform, show the sub-rectangular form most clearly. Visitors to the area should not expect a monument with signage or an obvious earthen bank; the interest lies in reading the field pattern itself, ideally with the aerial view open on a phone for comparison. The nearby barrow group to the south is the more legible feature for anyone making the journey out to this quiet corner of Limerick farmland.