The enclosure is roughly 26 metres across and univallate, meaning it has a single surrounding bank rather than the multiple concentric rings seen at more elaborate sites. That bank is now only partially legible: in places it survives as a low scarp, in others as a very slight ridge, and in at least one section a modern field wall has simply been built along its line, borrowing the old boundary without acknowledging it.

Ringforts of this kind were typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, serving as enclosed farmsteads for a family or small community, the raised interior offering some measure of drainage and visibility. What makes Listonavally particularly interesting is the rumoured presence of a souterrain beneath it. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or series of chambers, usually associated with storage or refuge, and the tradition here connects the site to a description recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters, nineteenth-century field notes compiled by scholars travelling Ireland on behalf of the survey. That earlier account described several chambers and passages located within a circular hut foundation inside what was then a destroyed rath. Whether the remains beneath Listonavally and that earlier account refer to the same feature is not certain, but the possibility links this low and unassuming enclosure to a much older chain of observation and curiosity. The site was catalogued by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, one of the more thorough regional surveys carried out in the country.