A lios, in Irish tradition, is a ringfort or enclosed settlement, typically of early medieval date, and the word carries with it a certain wariness; such places were associated with the otherworld and were often left untouched by farmers who might otherwise have cleared any inconvenient earthwork without a second thought. That local name, quietly preserved, is itself a clue that something older is being remembered here.

The enclosure is a modest rectangle, roughly 26 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west, bounded by a stone-faced earthen field fence. What makes it quietly curious is what the maps reveal over time. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 records it as a square field, but by the later surveys of 1900 and 1944 its outline had been interpreted as sub-circular, a shape far more typical of a ringfort. Stone-faced earthen banks are a common form of ringfort construction in Munster, where the bank of an ancient enclosure could, over centuries, be absorbed into a field boundary without anyone quite deciding where the archaeology ended and the farmland began. Whether the shape changed, or whether different surveyors simply read the same boundaries differently, is not recorded.