The example at Lissadrone in County Mayo belongs to a class of monument known as a rath, a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built predominantly during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of habitation. That so many survive at all is partly a matter of folklore: generations of farmers left them untouched, cautious of disturbing what were widely believed to be the dwelling places of the fairies.

Ringforts were typically home to a single family of relatively modest means, though the number of enclosing banks could indicate higher social status. Inside, a family would have kept their livestock overnight, worked leather and metal, and lived in timber or wattle-and-daub structures that have long since vanished. The placename Lissadrone itself offers a small clue to the site's past: "lios", the Irish word for a ringfort or enclosure, appears embedded in it, suggesting the monument was significant enough to anchor the local place-name over centuries. Mayo's landscape holds a considerable density of such sites, many of them poorly documented and quietly eroding under the pressures of agriculture and weather.