The one at Lisheenacooravan sits instead on flat land, its raised circular platform looking out quietly over Ballysadare Bay in County Sligo. That flatness makes it slightly anomalous, and yet the positioning still speaks to a careful choice of place, a site where the water and the surrounding terrain would have been visible to whoever once lived inside.

A rath, as this type of monument is classified, is an early medieval enclosure, typically dating from roughly 500 to 1000 AD, built to define and protect a farmstead rather than serve any strictly military purpose. At Lisheenacooravan, the circular interior measures 32 metres in diameter, enclosed by an earthen bank roughly 3 metres wide and standing to about 0.90 metres in height. Outside the bank runs a ditch of similar width, surviving to a depth of between 0.20 and 0.30 metres, though it would originally have been considerably deeper. The entrance gap, at 2.80 metres wide, faces north, which is somewhat unusual since most ringfort entrances favour the east or south, orientations associated with the rising sun and with shelter from prevailing westerly winds. Whether the northern aspect here reflects a practical response to the local landscape or something more particular to the people who built it is now impossible to say.