The road was already there by 1838, when the Ordnance Survey first mapped the area, which means the division is old enough to have been absorbed into the landscape almost without comment. A field wall running north to south through the southern half, thickly grown with blackthorn, adds a further layer of fragmentation. The overall effect is of an ancient boundary that the modern world has quietly dismantled from the inside.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Lisheenmoyle, as it is named on both the 1838 and 1929 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, originally formed a roughly circular enclosure some 33 to 35 metres in diameter, defined by a low bank of earth and stone. That bank has taken considerable damage over the years. A section at the south-west and west had already been levelled by the time of an inspection in 1987. Reclamation work in 2004 destroyed a further arc of roughly 14 metres in the south-east quadrant. Then in 2003, road-widening by Mayo County Council damaged the bank on the east side where it meets the road. An archaeological excavation carried out in advance of those road works investigated a small area of the interior, measuring 7.5 by 3 metres, but found it too disturbed to yield any remains in their original position. The excavation did, however, expose what may be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber associated with early medieval settlements, sometimes used for storage or refuge. The drystone wall forming part of it was found in section near the centre of the rath interior, its full extent still unknown.

The ringfort sits on a drumlin ridge, one of those elongated glacially deposited hills characteristic of this part of the west of Ireland, and commands broad views of the surrounding countryside. Visitors approaching across average pasture will find an enclosure that requires some imagination to read whole, given the road, the field wall, and the accumulated losses to the bank. What remains is still legible as a roughly circular form, and the possible souterrain beneath the embankment lends the place a particular quality of incompleteness, the suggestion of something that has not yet been fully understood.