What remains is barely a suggestion: a circular area of roughly thirty metres in diameter, defined by an earth and stone bank and an outer fosse, the latter being a shallow defensive ditch that would once have reinforced the enclosure. Of the original circuit, only the southern to western arc still holds its shape, preserved almost by accident as a field boundary. The bank reaches a little over a metre in external height and spans three and a half metres in width; the fosse beside it is shallower still, half a metre deep and just over two metres wide. Elsewhere, the structure has been destroyed.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when constructed primarily of earthwork rather than stone, were the dominant form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland, broadly from the fifth to the twelfth century. Thousands were built across the country, most serving as the defended homesteads of farming families rather than as military fortifications in any formal sense. The bank and ditch were sufficient to deter opportunistic cattle raiders and to define a household's territory. What makes the Lismakeeve example worth a second look is its setting and its immediate archaeological neighbourhood. It sits within a mountainous region, which was less densely settled than the lowland plains, and it lies close to a moated site to the northwest. Moated sites, rectangular enclosures surrounded by water-filled ditches, belong to a later medieval tradition associated with Anglo-Norman or Gaelic lords of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The proximity of both monument types, representing different eras and possibly different communities, gives this otherwise fragmentary site a quiet complexity.