Lissavoggy, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for Kilcummin parish in the 1840s, was noted as taking its name from the Irish for being surrounded by a soft boggy place. That explanation, written down by surveyors working their way across Kerry nearly two centuries ago, is now one of the more precise things we know about this particular site.

The structure is a rath, an enclosed circular farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by an earthen bank and used as a defended homestead for a farming family. Here the bank runs to about six metres wide and survives to roughly sixty centimetres in height, with the inner face along the south-east arc still showing deliberate stone-facing. The interior is concave, dipping slightly toward a flattish centre, and loose stones are scattered across the south-east quadrant. A shallow depression sits against the inner bank at the south-east, and what appears to have been the original entrance gap at the north-west is still readable at around two and a half metres wide. A second break in the bank at the east, roughly four metres across, has been filled with a stone deposit that spills into the interior, suggesting later interference or collapse. Cut into the outer face of the bank at the south-west is a rectangular, stone-lined recess, tentatively identified as the remains of a lime kiln, a small furnace used to burn limestone into agricultural quicklime, a common feature added to older earthworks in post-medieval farming practice. The eastern face of the bank has also been cut away sharply at some point, leaving an almost vertical profile, evidence of the various practical pressures these sites absorb over centuries of continued land use.