And yet the geometry is precise enough, and the setting unusual enough, that it rewards a second look. The site sits just south of the summit of a karst ridge running east to west, karst being the distinctive limestone landscape of County Clare where the ground is riddled with fissures and solution hollows. That anyone chose to raise an earthen platform here at all, and to define it so carefully with a fosse and outer bank, speaks to some deliberate intention, even if that intention is now unclear.

The ringfort, a type of circular enclosed settlement used widely in early medieval Ireland, was already a diminished thing when the antiquary T. J. Westropp visited and measured it in 1915. He described an earthen fort roughly 135 feet across, with a central platform of about 105 feet and a rampart barely a foot high, giving what he called the garth a slightly cupped appearance, the platform rising some five feet above the encircling fosse. More recent survey work has confirmed the broad picture: the raised platform measures approximately 30 metres east to west and just under 30 metres north to south, standing between one and one and a half metres high. Traces of an earthen bank survive around the northern arc, and a flat-bottomed fosse, between one and a half and nearly four metres wide, runs all the way around. An outer bank is still visible along the southern and western sides. Both the 1840 and 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps mark and name the feature as Lisket, which preserves the Irish lios, meaning an enclosed ring, and the site has evidently held its name across at least two centuries of cartography. Some later intervention is also legible in the ground: a ledge cut around the perimeter mound, stones packed into the north-western section of the fosse to allow access, and the mostly demolished foundations of a wall at the western outer edge, about nine metres long.