A dense patch of nettles, a faint trace of a bank at one end, and a north-facing slope of ordinary grassland are all that remain of what was once a substantial enclosed settlement, roughly 65 metres in diameter. The nettles are, in their own quiet way, a clue; they tend to colonise disturbed or nutrient-rich ground, and their persistence around abandoned earthworks is a small but reliable signal that something once stood here.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used to protect a farmstead and its livestock. The one at Liss was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which dates to the nineteenth century, meaning that at some point between that survey and the present, the western sector of the enclosure was partially damaged and the rest gradually lost to the ground. The place-name Liss itself is telling; it derives from the Irish lios, a common term for exactly this kind of enclosed settlement, suggesting that the memory of the fort was embedded in the landscape long before anyone thought to map it formally. By the time the site was assessed in detail, the most archaeologists could confirm was the ghost of a bank associated with a cashel or enclosure feature to the west, catalogued separately in the county record.