At Lissavorneed, outside Newquay, a large oval rath sits on good pastureland near the crest of a north-east-facing slope, its ancient earthen bank now so thoroughly absorbed into the everyday agricultural landscape that a modern cattle gap has been cut straight through one side. The rath, a type of circular or oval ringfort typically used as an enclosed farmstead during the early medieval period, measures roughly 45.7 metres east to west and 41 metres north to south. It is not a dramatic ruin. It is the kind of place that rewards attention precisely because it asks for so little of it.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1915, named there as Lissavorneen, and on Robinson's 1977 map under the Irish form Lios an Boirnín. The earthen bank that defines the rath is low and wide, and a later field wall has been built directly along its top, running south-east to north-west, effectively pressing two different eras of land management into the same narrow ridge. Along the western side, the outer face of the bank has lost its sod cover entirely, exposing the raw earthen construction beneath. A gap six metres wide on the south-east may mark the site of the original entrance, subsequently widened over centuries of use. More intriguing still is a souterrain located in the south-west sector of the enclosure. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval raths and thought to have served for storage or refuge. This one is now inaccessible, its purpose unreachable, its interior unknown.