At Ballytarsna in County Tipperary, a well-preserved ringfort sits atop a low rise in open grassland, its interior entirely sealed off by dense cover that has grown unchecked across the enclosed ground. The earthworks themselves are clearly legible from the outside; it is simply impossible to walk in.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the fifth to the twelfth century. They consist of a raised, roughly circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and an external fosse, a ditch dug to provide material for the bank and to add a further barrier. The Ballytarsna example is a solid specimen of the type. Its interior measures approximately 31 metres across on a north-south axis, and the surrounding bank retains an external height of around two metres, with a base width of 3.5 metres. Beyond the bank lies an outer fosse up to four metres wide at the top. The whole circuit is interrupted on the western side, where a modern field boundary cuts across both bank and fosse on a north-south line, the kind of agricultural intrusion that has altered or erased similar monuments across the Irish countryside. Despite that, the structure is described as well preserved, which, given how comprehensively many raths have been levelled by ploughing or development over the centuries, is worth noting. The elevated position offers good views in all directions, a quality that would have mattered as much to whoever enclosed this ground a thousand years ago as it does to anyone standing at the bank today.