What survives is a rath, a type of ringfort formed by a raised bank of earth with a fosse, or ditch, on its outer edge, the whole enclosure once serving as a farmstead and defended homestead in early medieval Ireland. At Lisdoran, this bank and fosse survive through the southern, western, and northern arc of the circuit, giving the structure a diameter of just under thirty metres. The rest of the perimeter has been lost entirely to the land.

Ringforts are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, with estimates running to tens of thousands, yet the majority have been levelled, ploughed out, or simply forgotten. The Lisdoran example was noted as long ago as 1918, when H. T. Knox recorded it in his survey work that would later inform the published inventory of Galway's archaeology. By the time the site was formally described, it was already much overgrown, its condition assessed as fair, meaning the surviving earthworks were legible but showing the effects of time and encroaching scrub. The partial arc that remains hints at the full circle that once existed, a boundary separating the domestic interior from the wider landscape beyond.