The irony is considerable: a monument that survived centuries of Irish history has been used, in more recent times, as a convenient skip. Yet the ringfort at Lisladeen endures, its earthen bank still standing around 1.25 metres high and enclosing a roughly circular area of nearly 47 metres across.

Ringforts, or raths, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside, typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD. They served as enclosed farmsteads, the bank and ditch offering a degree of protection for a family and their livestock. What makes the Lisladeen example particularly interesting is the presence of a souterrain in its south-western quadrant. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, usually built into the interior of a ringfort and thought to have served as a place of refuge, cold storage, or both. By 1939, when P. J. Hartnett noted the site in print, the interior was already being put to agricultural use as a dumping ground for field clearance stones, a fate common to ringforts across Ireland once their original purpose had been forgotten or the land pressure became too great.