At Lissheeda, a roughly circular enclosure sits on a south-west-facing slope, its earthen bank still standing to a height of 1.6 metres along the northern and eastern arc. This is a rath, the most common form of ringfort in Ireland, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country in various states of preservation, yet each one carries a slightly different profile shaped by the land it occupies and the centuries that have worked on it since.

The enclosure at Lissheeda measures approximately 51.4 metres east to west and 48.2 metres north to south, placing it within the typical size range for a single-family farmstead of its era. The bank, which forms the main visible boundary from the north-west around to the north-east, is stone-faced on its outer side in that northern stretch, a detail that suggests some effort at permanence or display. To the south-east, rather than a built bank, the ground drops away as a scarp, and the silted remains of an external fosse, a defensive ditch dug to accompany the bank, can still be traced along the south-east to north-west side. A laneway now skirts the northern bank, and a modern field fence running north to south cuts across the eastern edge of the interior, a mundane intrusion that is nonetheless a useful reminder of how continuously these enclosures have been incorporated into working farmland long after their original purpose was forgotten.