What makes the Lisgall rath quietly compelling is the way its past and present uses overlap without quite cancelling each other out, and the degree to which the site's original form can still, in places, be read in the landscape.

When a survey was carried out in 1967, the rath presented as a large grass-covered enclosure, roughly fifty metres across in both directions, with apple trees growing across ground that sloped southward. A scarp, the earthen step that marks the outer edge of the enclosure, was still clearly defined on the southern side, standing nearly two metres high and almost two metres wide before it dissolved into the natural gradient of the hillside toward the northwest and northeast. More telling was what surveyors found at the centre: a slightly domed area about thirty metres across, ringed by a subtle fosse, that is, a ditch, which showed up not as an obvious cut in the ground but as a change in the vegetation growing over it. That detail pointed toward the site being a bivallate rath, meaning it originally had two concentric banks and ditches rather than one, a form generally associated with higher-status occupation in early medieval Ireland. By 1995, farm buildings had been constructed across the eastern portion of the interior, altering that part of the site substantially and making what had once been a legible earthwork considerably harder to interpret from ground level.