Whether that draughtsman was working from an unusual feature in the ground or simply made a cartographic choice, it gives the site an odd distinction that sets it apart from the thousands of more conventionally recorded ringforts scattered across the Irish landscape.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by a single earthen bank and ditch. What makes Lisatouragh, as this site is locally known, more notable is that it carries three concentric earthen banks with intervening fosses, placing it in the rarer category of trivallate ringforts, a form sometimes associated with higher-status occupants. The placename itself points in the same direction. Writing in 1934, a scholar named Bowman argued that Lisatouragh most probably derives from Lios na Teamhrach, meaning Fort of the Royal Palace. He recorded a triple-ramparted fort with a small annexe to the north measuring roughly 21 by 19 yards, and noted grass-covered mounds in the interior that he identified as the foundations of hut sites. The site sits on a gentle north-north-westerly facing slope above the Awbeg River, a setting that would have offered both visibility and proximity to water. The outer bank reaches about 0.7 metres in height, the middle bank rises to around 0.9 metres internally, and several breaks in the banks to the north-west and north-north-west may represent original or later entrances.

The western sections of the banks and most of the interior are now heavily overgrown and effectively inaccessible, which makes close inspection difficult. The clearest surviving earthworks face north and east, and the grass-covered mounds Bowman described in the interior may still be detectable underfoot, even if the vegetation makes them hard to read from a distance.