A rath, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a circular earthwork enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead, its banks and ditches offering both practical defence and a mark of status. That such enclosures sometimes contain the traces of earlier or associated buildings is well established, but the house at Lislea sits at the quieter end of the archaeological record, present in the notes but absent from the landscape.

A report from 1976 placed the remains of a possible square house site just to the east of the rath's centre, measuring roughly five metres north to south and five metres east to west. The date of the structure is indeterminate, and nothing about it is visible at ground level today. What is recorded is the outline of a small, roughly square footprint, modest in scale, offering no obvious clues about when it was built or by whom. It is the kind of site that accumulates more questions than answers, a faint signal rather than a clear image.