A slight swelling here, a low undulation there, and that is more or less all that remains of a ringfort that was once a substantial earthwork enclosure, roughly oval in plan and around 35 metres across its north-south axis. Most visitors to the Irish countryside would walk straight over it.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead or place of refuge. This one at Lissurla was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which gives some measure of how thoroughly it has since been reduced. At the time of that survey it was clearly legible as a defined enclosure; today it has been levelled to the point where only the faint topography of the field betrays its outline. A thatched cottage, itself a recorded heritage structure, sits nearby to the northwest, lending the immediate landscape a layered quality that is easy to overlook but quietly telling. Both features speak to a continuity of habitation in this corner of Cork, from the early medieval period through to the vernacular rural architecture of more recent centuries.