The one at Lisleagh in north Cork is a little different: its inner bank slopes gently inward rather than presenting a flat floor, giving the enclosed space a shallow, saucer-like depression at the centre. It is a small but telling detail that speaks to how individually these early medieval enclosures were constructed, even when the basic form is familiar.

A rath, to use the Irish term most commonly applied to earthen examples of this monument type, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more banks and ditches, built primarily during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and typically associated with a single farmstead or the household of a local landowner. At Lisleagh, two concentric earthen banks surround a circular area approximately twenty-nine metres in diameter, with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. That fosse is waterlogged and overgrown, and the outer bank has been absorbed into a roadside boundary to the south-east, one of the quiet ways in which agricultural life over the centuries reshapes ancient earthworks without quite erasing them. A gap of roughly five metres in the inner bank to the north-north-east is interpreted as a possible original entrance, with a corresponding, smaller break in the outer bank aligning with it. A separate cattle gap to the north-north-west is almost certainly later. Beneath the interior, a possible souterrain may lie undisturbed; a souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, often used in early medieval Ireland for storage or concealment.

The site sits in level pasture, which means its low profile is easily underestimated from a distance. The waterlogged fosse and overgrown banks reward a slow circuit on foot, where the relationship between the two banks and the slight bowl of the interior becomes legible in a way that no photograph quite conveys.