The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 records a circular embanked enclosure roughly thirty metres across, drawn with the careful confidence of surveyors who had walked the ground. By the time later editions of the same mapping project returned to the area, the feature had simply vanished from the record, as though the land had quietly swallowed it.

At ground level, the enclosure has not entirely disappeared. A slight circular undulation in the soil, somewhere between thirty-five and forty metres in diameter, remains faintly legible, visible either as a surface ripple or as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that appears when differential moisture or soil depth causes grass or grain to grow unevenly above a buried feature. Circular embanked enclosures of this type are found widely across Ireland and are generally associated with early medieval settlement, the most familiar form being the ringfort or rath, a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks. The Lissatava example sits on a low elevation within an otherwise flat and open landscape, a position that would have given its original occupants reasonable visibility across the surrounding terrain. Whether the earthwork was slighted deliberately, ploughed down gradually, or simply absorbed into the improving agricultural activity of the nineteenth century is not recorded.