By the time archaeologists measured this low earthwork in the pasture above the Inny river in South Kerry, it had become something closer to a square, a raised platform of earth, gravel, and small stones sitting just 75 centimetres above the surrounding ground at its highest western edge. The name, Lios An Tsionnaigh, translates roughly as the enclosure or fort of the fox, and the site sits quietly in upland grazing land on the Iveragh Peninsula, one of the most archaeologically layered stretches of Ireland's southwest coast.

A lios, the Irish term for a roughly circular or oval earthen enclosure, typically marks the site of an early medieval farmstead, the kind of settlement that would have housed a single farming family along with their livestock and outbuildings, enclosed within a bank and ditch for security and boundary-marking rather than serious defence. What remains here is modest: a platform measuring about 7.4 metres northeast to southwest and 7.3 metres northwest to southeast, with a slightly sunken centre scattered with small stones, perhaps the ghost of an interior floor or the collapse of some earlier structure. The discrepancy between the oval shape recorded on the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey map and the roughly square form visible on the ground today is one of those small archaeological puzzles that fieldwork tends to leave open rather than resolve.