Lisheen, or Lisín in Irish, translates roughly as "little ringfort", and it preserves the memory of an enclosure that no longer has any visible presence on the ground. Ringforts, the circular or sub-circular earthen enclosures that once served as farmsteads across early medieval Ireland, are among the most common archaeological monument types in the country, but even common things can vanish entirely, worn away by centuries of agriculture, drainage work, or simple weathering.

This particular example in Tulla More, Co. Kerry, was sub-circular in plan and was cut slightly on a north-east to south-west axis by a small stream. It appeared on both the first and second editions of the Ordnance Survey maps, meaning it was still recognisable as a feature of the landscape at least into the nineteenth century. By 1974, however, it had already retreated to the margins of detectability; that year, aerial photographs taken by the Geological Survey of Ireland showed only a discolouration in the ground, the kind of crop or soil mark that reveals buried or levelled features to a camera where the eye on foot would see nothing at all. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded the site and confirmed that no surface trace survived at all by that point.

What remains, then, is a name attached to a field, and a faint signature in an old aerial photograph. The enclosure itself has gone, but the Irish habit of preserving old territorial and topographical terms in place-names means the word lisín keeps pointing, quietly and without fuss, to something that once stood here.