What remains is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These were not military fortifications in the conventional sense but rather the defended homesteads of farming families, their circular banks and ditches marking out a private world of livestock, household activity, and status. This particular example measures roughly 36.5 metres in diameter, placing it within the ordinary range of such sites, though ordinary is a relative term when the structure in question is well over a thousand years old.

The rath is defined by a bank and an external fosse, meaning a ditch dug around the outside of the bank to reinforce the enclosure. Both features survive, but only just. Quarrying has eaten into the enclosing elements on the north-west and east sides, eroding the very edges that once gave the site its coherence. A causeway crossing the fosse on the east-south-east side appears to be a modern addition rather than an original entrance feature, which means the original point of entry has either been lost or obscured. Around 170 metres to the south-east, a second ringfort survives, suggesting that this part of Lissavally was once a settled and perhaps relatively prosperous early medieval landscape, with neighbouring enclosures potentially occupied by related families or successive generations on the same land.

The site is not easy to read from the ground, and without some prior knowledge of what a rath looks like in its degraded form, the earthworks could easily be mistaken for natural undulations in the terrain. The damage from quarrying is the most immediately visible feature, particularly on the north-west arc where the bank has been most heavily reduced. The nearby ringfort to the south-east offers a point of comparison, and the two sites together give a sense of how densely these structures once populated the Irish countryside before centuries of agriculture, land clearance, and, in this case, stone extraction gradually unmade them.