The one at Thurlesbeg in County Tipperary preserves that ancient shape clearly enough, sitting on a south-east-facing slope with open views across the upland around it. What makes it quietly odd is what seems to have happened to it much later: the outer earthwork encircling it reads less like original archaeology and more like deliberate landscaping, as though someone in a relatively recent century decided the old fort would look rather well as a garden feature.

The ringfort itself is substantial. Its interior measures 36 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, enclosed by an earth and stone bank that still stands between one and two and a half metres above the surrounding ground on the exterior. Outside that runs a fosse, a defensive ditch, roughly five metres wide at the top, and beyond the fosse lies a wide, flat-topped outer bank. It is this outer bank that puzzles. Its profile is more consistent with a berm, a deliberately shaped earthen platform used as a landscape or garden element, than with any defensive or agricultural purpose. Thurlesbeg House stands immediately to the south of the monument, and though it does not appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, it is clearly present on the second edition surveyed in 1953 and 1954. The suspicion is that at some point in the nineteenth century the house's occupants remodelled the outer bank, widening and flattening its top to create a decorative circuit around the ancient enclosure. There is also a possibility the ringfort was pressed into service as a tree-ring during the same period, a practice whereby a ring of trees was planted within or around an older earthwork to create an ornamental grove.

The monument is well preserved across most of its circuit, though the outer bank and fosse have suffered some damage on the north-eastern to south-eastern arc. A narrow gap in the inner bank on the south-south-west side is likely no more than a livestock access point cut at some stage by farmers. Some 300 metres to the south-south-west lies a second ringfort, this one apparently levelled, hinting that the wider landscape here was once considerably more populated with such enclosures than its present pastoral quiet suggests.