The structure is there, but only just, its presence now confirmed by survey rather than by anything the eye can pick out. The monument is not visible at ground level, which makes it a curious kind of place, less a site you visit than one you stand unknowingly beside.

What surveyors recorded in 1976 was a raised subrectangular area, roughly 43 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 36 metres northwest to southeast, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone. Around this ran an external fosse, the term for a defensive ditch dug to reinforce the barrier of the bank, and described here as both wide and deep, suggesting the original construction was substantial. The overall form points to an enclosed settlement or defensive enclosure of the kind built across Ireland from the early medieval period onward, though no precise date has been established for Lislea. What had once been a legible entrance into the enclosure was no longer recognisable even by the time of the 1976 report, the original break in the bank having been lost to time and land use. The site sits on a gentle south-facing slope, a position that would have offered reasonable drainage and modest shelter, practical considerations that recur in the siting of such enclosures across the Irish midlands.