Look closer, and the outline of an early medieval ringfort begins to resolve itself, a circular enclosure roughly 39.5 metres in diameter, its geometry still legible beneath a dense tangle of hawthorn trees and bushes.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined by earthen banks rather than stone, were the most common form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland, built and occupied broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Lissaniska example follows the classic pattern: an inner scarp, which is the steep inner face of the bank, sits above an intervening fosse, the word for the surrounding ditch, with an outer bank beyond that. The interior rises gently towards the centre, a feature sometimes associated with the positioning of a house or structure at the highest and driest point within the enclosure. A hollow in the north-north-west sector is the product of later quarrying, a reminder that these earthworks have frequently been treated as convenient sources of stone or soil long after their original function was forgotten. The gap on the south-east side is modern, probably broken through to allow livestock access.

The site sits in fair condition overall, which, for an earthwork that has endured more than a thousand years of agricultural pressure, is no small thing. The hawthorn growth that obscures it is itself significant; hawthorns have long been associated in Irish folklore with fairy raths, and many local communities historically avoided disturbing such trees, which may partly explain why the earthworks survived at all.