The rath at Archerstown in County Tipperary occupies the southern end of just such a park, where the park's boundary wall has actually cut into and partially destroyed the ancient earthen bank it was built beside, a neat illustration of how later landowners reshaped the landscape with little ceremony for what was already there. Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, and were built as circular or oval areas bounded by an earthen bank and, usually, an external ditch. This one, oval in plan and measuring approximately 33.5 metres north to south and 38 metres east to west, has no visible trace of the expected outer ditch, which either silted away or was never dug.

The bank itself is an informative thing to read in section. It slopes gently toward the interior but drops away quite steeply on the outside, a profile that gave the enclosure a more imposing outward face than it might seem from within. A gap of around 2.6 metres in the south-east sector is a plausible candidate for the original entrance. The north-east quadrant has been quarried into at some point, with the material thrown inward rather than removed, suggesting opportunistic extraction rather than systematic demolition. The 1843 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a limekiln immediately to the north of the site, a structure used for burning limestone to produce quicklime for agricultural use, and its proximity hints at the working, practical landscape this corner of Tipperary remained long after the ringfort had ceased to function. Stranger still is a subrectangular platform of around 20 metres diameter sitting 5 to 6 metres to the north-west of the rath, described simply as being of unknown antiquity, and a further rectangular enclosure in the field to the north, measuring 47 by 22 metres, aligned almost north to south close to the deer-park's eastern wall. What relationship, if any, these earthworks have to the ringfort remains unresolved.