Then, apparently, someone else agreed. The result is that this ringfort in Gardenfield, County Limerick, now holds a small congregation of abandoned vehicles alongside whatever traces of early medieval life the ground beneath them might still contain. It is an arresting combination, and not an entirely uncommon fate for monuments of this type across rural Ireland.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the standard farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They are among the most numerous archaeological monument types in the country, numbering in the tens of thousands, which perhaps explains why individual examples can slip so easily into the background of working farmland. The Gardenfield example, recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the national monuments database in August 2011, sits in level pasture and takes a roughly circular form measuring 16.7 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west. Its defining feature is a scarped edge, meaning the ground has been cut or shaped to create a sharp drop, here standing around 1.2 metres high and 3.5 metres wide. A field boundary running north to south skirts the base of the scarped edge on the east-south-east side, and a farm trackway passes close to the monument on the south-west.

Accessing the site means navigating the realities of active farmland, so courtesy and awareness of land ownership are necessary. The farm trackway to the south-west marks the closest practical approach. Once there, the scarped edge is the most legible feature, giving a clear sense of the original enclosure even where the interior has been compromised. That interior, as the record notes plainly, is currently used as a dump for abandoned cars and general rubbish, which makes reading the archaeology of the enclosed space difficult. What the ground below those cars might yet contain, whether occupation layers, post holes, or other buried features, remains a matter for the imagination and, potentially, future investigation.