A lios is the Irish term for a ringfort, one of the circular earthwork enclosures, typically defined by a raised bank and internal area, that were built and occupied across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onwards. This particular example, a rath sitting on a south-facing terrace in Hilltown, County Cork, once stood to a height of around 3.1 metres. That is a substantial earthwork, the kind that would have been visible from some distance. Today there is no surface trace of it whatsoever.

According to local testimony from S. O'Mahony, the lios was levelled during the last century, its banks pushed flat and folded into the surrounding pasture. This was not an unusual fate. The twentieth century saw the removal of countless ringforts across Ireland, many of them cleared to make way for more productive agricultural land. What is left at Hilltown is the memory preserved in a field name, which is often how these sites persist longest, in the spoken and written geography of a place long after the physical form has been erased. The terrace itself remains, a subtle topographic feature at the base of the slope, which is at least part of the landscape the original builders would have chosen for the enclosure's position.