That decision is now so thoroughly embedded in the landscape of County Monaghan that the two things have become inseparable: the old earthwork and the cultivated ground it encloses have settled into each other over the years, and the result is a grass-covered circular enclosure that most people passing along the adjacent lane would take for a slight rise in the terrain rather than a site of archaeological interest.

A ringfort, or rath, was a roughly circular enclosed settlement typical of early medieval Ireland, usually defined by a raised bank and a surrounding ditch. The example at Liscarney sits just south of the summit of a drumlin, one of those smooth, rounded hills formed from glacial deposits that give County Monaghan much of its distinctive rolling character. The enclosure measures around 41.6 metres across its northeast to southwest axis and 40 metres across the other, making it a reasonably substantial example of the type. At its most legible section, on the south-southwest, a scarp roughly two metres high and two metres wide survives alongside an outer fosse, a word for the ditch that typically ran around the perimeter of such enclosures. Elsewhere, particularly to the northwest and northeast, the earthwork has been reduced to a shallow fosse, and a lane now cuts across the northeastern section, obscuring what was once part of the circuit. No original entrance has been identified. Liscarney House stands approximately eighty metres to the northeast, with farm buildings close beside it, and the whole arrangement has the feel of a place that quietly absorbed centuries of agricultural use without anyone making much fuss about what lay underneath.