What makes this particular rath, as these earthwork enclosures are known, quietly arresting is not simply its height but the fact that it is one of two. A second rath lies just 130 metres to the north-north-west, on a neighbouring rise, and the two enclosures seem almost to have been placed in deliberate conversation with one another across the low ground between them.

Raths were typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and functioned as enclosed farmsteads, their earthen banks and ditches marking status and providing a degree of security for a household and its livestock. The Listrisnan example is an oval, measuring roughly 32 metres north-east to south-west and nearly 37 metres in the other direction, with a scarp that benefits from the natural steepness of the hillock beneath it. A shallow depression running around the outside from the west-south-west to the north may be the remnant of a fosse, the ditch that would originally have reinforced the outer face of the bank, though it is also possible this feature reflects later agricultural use, the rath having been absorbed at some point into a system of field boundaries. A stream follows the southern base of the hill, and its course coincides with the townland boundary, suggesting the site has long served as a natural landmark in the local landscape.

The interior is grassy and open, slightly elevated in the north-west quadrant, with a dense growth of gorse along the southern arc of the perimeter. There is no clearly defined original entrance; cattle now use a worn gap in the north-west of the scarp to come and go, which gives the place a certain lived-in quality that, in its own way, is entirely in keeping with a monument that was always, at its core, a working farmstead.