The example uncovered at Monadreela in County Tipperary is modest in scale, just 5.7 metres in diameter, with a surrounding fosse, or ditch, no more than 23 centimetres deep in places. What makes it quietly puzzling is precisely what it lacks: no bones, no grave goods, no sign of anyone having lived there. Whether the monument ever held a burial at its centre is now impossible to say with certainty, because centuries of farming appear to have stripped away the upper portion entirely, taking whatever evidence it might have contained.

The Monadreela ring-ditch came to light not through a planned research excavation but as a consequence of road construction, specifically the building of the N8 Cashel Bypass and the N74 Link Road South. This kind of rescue archaeology, carried out in advance of development, regularly produces its most interesting results almost incidentally. The excavation was published by Hughes and O'Flanagan in 2003. The ring-ditch did not stand alone in the landscape: roughly 50 metres to the east, excavators uncovered a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site characterised by a trough and a mound of fire-cracked stone, typically associated with the Bronze Age. To the south and south-east, within about the same distance, a cluster of pits and post-holes was found, one of them containing Bronze Age pottery. Together, these features suggest that the east-facing slope of this east-west ridge was a place of some activity during prehistory, even if the precise relationship between the ring-ditch and its neighbours remains uncertain. The ditch itself, variously V-shaped or steep-sided with a flat base depending on where it was measured, is slight enough that it would have been barely visible in the ground even before agriculture did its work.