Sitting on a south-facing slope in County Kerry, the rath at Lissavane measures 38 metres across, its earthen bank still legible in the pasture, rising to nearly a metre on the exterior. A fosse, the defensive ditch that typically rings such enclosures, runs intermittently around the perimeter, widening and flattening along the southern arc as the terrain shifts. There is a possible outer bank as well, folded into what is now an irregular field boundary, and hints of a second outer fosse to the north-east. Four separate openings punctuate the circuit, including a causeway entrance roughly seven to eight metres wide at the south-east and a gateway to the north-west, suggesting a site that was not simply enclosed but deliberately organised around movement through it.

Ringforts, known in Irish as ráth when they take this earthen form, were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its associated buildings between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. What elevates the Lissavane example beyond the ordinary is the presence of a souterrain in the interior. These are underground stone-lined passages, most likely used for cool storage or as a place of refuge, and their construction required considerable effort and planning. The rath also sits within a small cluster of related monuments; two further ringforts lie within 250 metres to the west and west-northwest, which points to a landscape that was once quite densely settled and organised, with neighbouring enclosures probably occupied by related families or social units farming the same ground.

The site is currently under pasture and, as the survey record notes with characteristic understatement, the entire rath has been poached by cattle, meaning the earthworks have been disturbed by animal trampling over many seasons. The banks and fosse remain readable in the field, but the softer detail of the interior surface has suffered accordingly.