In Irish townland nomenclature, "lios" refers to a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosures that served as farmsteads across early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century. The name, then, is essentially describing itself: a place already known, long before any modern record-keeping, by the structure that defined it.

Ringforts, or raths, were typically formed by one or more banks of earth and accompanying ditches thrown up around a central living area. They are among the most numerous archaeological monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded across the island, yet each one represents a particular household, a particular patch of land, worked and defended by people whose names are almost never recoverable. The Galway example at Lisnamoltaun belongs to this vast, largely anonymous category of early Irish settlement, its precise history, dimensions, and condition currently undocumented in any publicly available form.

What can be said is that the townland itself preserves the memory of the structure in its name, which is often how these sites survive at all, as a word on a map long after the earthworks have been ploughed flat or obscured by centuries of agricultural change. Whether the banks here remain visible on the ground is not recorded, but the name alone suggests the fort was prominent enough, at some point in the past, to give the whole place its identity.