The ringfort at Lisdowney, known historically as the Dhooneeach, is today little more than a low swell in the ground, a circular platform roughly 30 metres across rising only a metre or so above the surrounding land. The enclosing fosse, the ditch that would originally have defined and defended the site, can still be traced around most of its circuit, but the earthwork itself has been considerably reduced. A ringfort, to borrow the simplest description, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically associated with farmsteads of the Early Medieval period in Ireland. What makes this one quietly striking is not what survives but what was done to it.

The writer William Carrigan, whose four-volume history of the diocese of Ossory was published in 1905, described the site with some feeling. He placed it at the centre of a field known locally as the well field, close to Lisdowney village, and named it as the original Dhooneeach, a placename that still echoed through the local landscape in his time. His account noted that a pigeon house had been built on the fort roughly a hundred years before he was writing, and that this construction, requiring material and levelling, had contributed substantially to the fort's diminished state. The site sits on a natural rise above bogland, with a stream running roughly east to west about 40 metres to the north, a position that would have given its original inhabitants moderate but practical views across the valley floor.

When surveyors visited in 1987 they could make out the enclosure as a subtle rise in the field, and aerial imagery reviewed more recently has suggested the picture is more complex than Carrigan could have known. Two enclosures appear to the north of the well. The one to the northeast is less legible and may be the denuded ringfort itself. The one to the northwest, possibly what a local landowner described as a cleared-away wet rath, appears to be square rather than circular, which would suggest it is a moated site, a form of enclosed settlement more commonly associated with Anglo-Norman landlords of the medieval period. The two sites, one pre-Norman and one possibly post-Norman, sitting within a few metres of each other in a single Kilkenny field, quietly complicate the story of who lived here and when.