A circular enclosure, once substantial enough to be recorded on Ordnance Survey maps in both 1841 to 1842 and again in 1914 to 1915, has since vanished entirely from the landscape, leaving no surface trace whatsoever. The site is classified as a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. These enclosures, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches arranged in a circle, served as farmsteads for families of middling status, protecting livestock and household from both animal and human threat. That this one was still visible to surveyors in the early twentieth century and has since disappeared entirely makes it an unusually well-documented case of a site lost not to antiquity but to comparatively recent land use.

The ringfort at Lissahane was situated to the south-east of another recorded monument in the same area, suggesting a landscape that was once moderately dense with early medieval activity. Its appearance on two separate rounds of Ordnance Survey mapping confirms it was a real and legible earthwork for the better part of a century after systematic Irish mapping began in the 1830s. At some point between the 1914 to 1915 survey and the present day, it was levelled, most likely through agricultural clearance. North Kerry has seen considerable land improvement over the past century, and ringforts across the region have been lost in significant numbers to drainage works, ploughing, and the removal of field boundaries. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded the site's former existence and noted the absence of any surviving remains.