The enclosure at Lisheenakirka measures roughly sixteen metres east to west and just under eleven metres north to south, defined by a low, round-topped earthen bank that varies considerably in height, from a barely perceptible ten centimetres in places to just over a metre at its most pronounced. There is no clear trace of an outer fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks, and no obvious entrance gap survives. What remains is subtle enough that only close attention, or the right angle of low winter light raking across the ground, would reveal it at all.

The place-name offers its own quiet clue. The Irish form, Lisín na Circe, translates roughly as "the little fort of the hen" or "the small enclosure of the hen," a diminutive of lios, the Irish word for a ringfort-type enclosure. Ringforts were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically circular or oval banks of earth or stone enclosing a farmstead. This one, small and poorly preserved as it is, was considered significant enough to be hachured and named on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1842 and 1915, meaning cartographers at both points in time recognised it as a distinct feature worth recording. The name Lisheenakirka appears consistently across those editions, while the Irish form was documented separately in Tim Robinson's 1977 map of the area.