The ancient enclosure in Doon North, County Limerick, known historically as Lisselim, sits on elevated ground on a north-east-facing slope, and by the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1840 at the six-inch scale, an administrative line running east to west passed straight through it. Whoever drew that boundary was carving up land with little apparent regard for what had stood there since the early medieval period.

Ringforts, also called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular or oval enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a defended farmstead. The Doon North example is modest in scale: the 1897 Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map shows an oval shape measuring approximately 25 metres east to west and 21 metres north to south. Notably, the northern enclosing element of the monument appears to have been formed, or at least reinforced, by the townland boundary of Doon North itself, which means the administrative and archaeological features had become physically entangled by the time Victorian surveyors arrived. The name Lisselim, annotated on that earlier 1840 map, is of the type commonly attached to ringforts across Ireland, with "lis" being an Irish-language term for such an enclosure.

By the time satellite imagery captured the site between 2011 and 2018, the enclosure was visible as a roughly oval, scrub-covered feature, with rough pasture across much of the immediate area. Forestry abuts the monument to the north, and more recent planting had appeared to the east, south, and west by the 2018 Google Earth imagery, meaning the enclosure is increasingly hemmed in by commercial woodland. Approaching from the north-east-facing slope gives the clearest sense of the elevated position the original inhabitants chose, though the scrub cover and surrounding forestry now make a close reading of the earthworks themselves more difficult than the OS maps alone might suggest.