These circular enclosures, known in Irish as ráth when defined by an earthen bank and ditch, were the everyday farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, home to a single family and their livestock, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Ireland has somewhere in the region of forty to fifty thousand of them recorded, which makes them the most common archaeological monument in the country, yet each one occupied a specific piece of ground for specific reasons, and the details of any individual site, its dimensions, its number of enclosing banks, its internal features, can tell a quite particular story.

The townland name Lissanearla is itself suggestive. The element lios, anglicised here as liss, is one of the standard Irish words for a ringfort or its enclosure, meaning the name of the place is essentially built around the monument's existence. Earla may derive from a personal name or a local territorial designation, though without further documentation it is difficult to be certain. What is clear is that the fort was significant enough, or visible enough, to give its name to the land around it, a pattern repeated across Ireland wherever these earthworks survived into the period when townland names were being fixed in the written record.