The ringfort at Listellick sits on a south-facing slope in County Kerry, its sub-circular bank of stone and earth still tracing an enclosure roughly 27.5 metres north to south and 26.5 metres east to west. A rath, as this type of monument is commonly known, is a ringfort defined by an earthen bank rather than a stone wall, and was typically the enclosed farmstead of a reasonably prosperous family during the early medieval period. This one has been worn and altered over the centuries, with several gaps breaking the circuit of the bank, and its southern side absorbed wholesale into a later field boundary.

What makes the site quietly interesting is its topography and the particular way it was constructed. Rather than sitting proudly on level ground, it has been scarped back into the hillside, meaning the builders cut into the slope to create a platform, leaving the bank sheer on its outer, downhill face while it slopes gradually inward toward the centre. The result is an interior with a shallow, saucer-like profile and a measurable height difference of 1.29 metres between the northern and southern ends of the site. This kind of deliberate terracing is not unusual for ringforts on sloped ground, but the detail here is precise enough to be striking. There is no trace of a ditch, either inside or outside the bank, which sets it apart from many comparable sites where a ditch was dug to provide the material for the enclosing bank. Michael Connolly, writing in his 2008 doctoral thesis on the prehistoric settlement of the Lee Valley near Tralee, recorded these measurements and observations as part of a broader landscape study of the area, noting that the Listellick rath is the more easterly of two monuments recorded in close proximity to one another.