A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches encircling a domestic interior. This one at Lisnarawer sat on elevated ground among undulating pasture, a position that would once have offered both visibility and a degree of natural advantage. Its current condition is far from typical: road-widening works reduced the site to near-total destruction.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced across successive editions from the nineteenth century onwards, consistently recorded the enclosure as a clear circular form, bisected by the road alignment running west-northwest to east-southeast. That cartographic evidence is now among the clearest indicators of what once existed here. What survives on the ground is minimal. To the north-northeast of the road, a short length of bank remains, running about four metres in length and standing only around sixty centimetres high. To the south-southwest, traces of a shallow depression, roughly three metres wide, curve in an arc from east through south to west, with a low rise of approximately 4.7 metres width just outside it. These faint earthworks are thought to be remnants of the original perimeter bank and ditch, the defining features of the rath before the road consumed it.

Visitors to the area who know where to look will find very little to reward close inspection. The surviving bank to the north of the road is short and unimposing, and the traces to the south are sufficiently subtle that they could easily be mistaken for natural undulations in the pasture. The site's real interest lies less in what remains than in the contrast between what the old maps recorded and what a road scheme erased.