This ringfort in Ballyhomulta was recorded on Robinson's 1977 map as Lios Caointe, a name traced by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in 1915 to a local tradition of fairy songs being heard here. The Irish word lios refers to an enclosed fort of this kind, and the association between such sites and otherworldly music was not unusual in rural Irish folklore; ringforts were widely believed to be inhabited by the supernatural, and farmers left them alone accordingly. That a specific name encoding that belief survived into late twentieth-century cartography says something about how persistently the reputation clung to this particular spot.

The earthwork itself is a substantial double-banked rath, a ringfort type defined by two concentric earthen banks separated by a flat-bottomed ditch, known as a fosse, and a narrow berm, the shelf of ground between the inner bank and the fosse. Ringforts of this kind were typically built and occupied during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and served as farmstead enclosures for a single family or small kin group. This one is nearly circular, its interior measuring around 29 metres across, with the total enclosure extending to roughly 50 metres north to south. The inner bank, though damaged at the south where it has been cut away to leave a straight edge, still stands up to 1.6 metres on its outer face for much of its circuit. The outer bank is overlaid to the north-east by a later field wall, and has been quarried away to the south-south-west, the small indignities of agricultural centuries. Beneath the northern part of the interior there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, features commonly associated with early medieval ringforts and thought to have served for storage or concealment. The fort sits on a south-east-facing shoulder of hill in what is now reclaimed pasture, with open views stretching from east round to south-west, a position that would have commanded good sightlines in any era. It appears on both the 1842 and 1920 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked with the hachure symbols used to indicate an earthwork, which means it was already a recognised feature of the landscape long before any formal archaeological record was made.