A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was a circular or near-circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period in Ireland. What makes this one linger in the mind is less its physical remains than its name: Lisheenacluvane, from the Irish Lisín a' Chlumháin, meaning the little fort of the hairy man.

The surviving arc of the enclosure runs roughly forty metres from south-east to south-west, forming a scarp about two metres high that defines a raised platform on the slope. The site sits on a gentle west-facing hillside, with wide views opening out to the west and north-west across the River Lee. That commanding aspect would have been entirely deliberate; early medieval ringfort builders consistently chose ground that allowed them to observe approaching movement across the landscape. O'Donoghue, writing in 1986, recorded both the Irish form of the name and its translation, and it is the translation that does most of the work here. Who the hairy man was, whether a particular individual, a mythological figure, or some half-remembered local story attached to the site over centuries, is not recorded. The name simply persists, attached to a scarp in a graveyard on a Cork hillside.