The rath, roughly forty metres in diameter, was once defined by a double bank with a fosse between them. A fosse is simply a defensive ditch, and together with its enclosing banks it would have formed the boundary of an early medieval farmstead, the kind of enclosed settlement that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland. What survives here is partial at best: the earthworks are clearest from the north-west around to the north, while the rest of the circuit, from north through east to south, has been buried or obscured beneath field-clearance rubble, the accumulated stone dragged from surrounding fields over generations of agricultural tidying. A field bank cuts across the monument at both its northern and southern edges, further interrupting any reading of its original form.

Ringforts of this type were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single family and their livestock within a banked enclosure. They were built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, though many continued in use or in folk memory long after. The Lissacarha example is a bivallate rath, meaning it had two enclosing banks rather than one, a form sometimes associated with higher-status occupants, though the evidence here is too eroded to draw firm conclusions. What gives the site an additional layer of interest is its proximity to a second ringfort lying approximately one hundred and thirty metres to the south. Two such monuments in close proximity, both in the same townland, suggest this was once a more densely settled landscape than the empty grassland visible today.