Lios an Phúca, anglicised to Lissaphúca, translates roughly as the fort of the púca, that shapeshifting spirit of Irish folklore associated with darkness, mischief, and boundaries between the human world and something less definable. It is a fitting name for an earthwork that has been sitting quietly in a Kerry pasture for well over a thousand years, overlooking the valley of the River Laune.

The site is a bivallate rath, meaning a ringfort enclosed by two concentric banks and ditches rather than the single circuit more commonly encountered. Ringforts of this type, typically earthen enclosures used as defended farmsteads during the early medieval period, are found in large numbers across Ireland, but the double circuit was a marker of some status or ambition on the part of the original occupants. This one measures around 32 metres across its interior east to west. The outer bank still stands up to 2.6 metres above the surrounding ground, with a flat-bottomed fosse, essentially a ditch cut between the two banks, dropping about 1.6 metres to its base. Above that fosse the inner bank rises a further 3 metres to its crest, which is almost level with the interior. The northern half of the enclosure has suffered considerable disturbance over time, and the site is now planted with pine trees, which give it an oddly formal, sheltered quality at odds with the open pasture around it. The outer bank's inner face has also degraded on the north-western side. What survives on the south, though, preserves the profile of the earthwork clearly enough to convey its original scale.

The site sits on ground that slopes gently northward toward the Laune, and despite the tree cover it retains broad views in most directions, which was almost certainly part of the point when someone chose this particular rise in the landscape to build.