The one known as Garryduff I, sitting on a ridge crest in County Cork with open views in every direction, offered something considerably stranger. When archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly excavated it in 1963, the finds included a small gold bird, quantities of imported E-ware pottery (a type of continental ceramic associated with early medieval exchange networks), numerous bronze ring pins, glass beads, trial pieces suggesting craft experimentation, and physical evidence of iron-smelting, copper-alloy working, and possibly glass-working, all within a single enclosed settlement.

The site itself is a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen or stone bank and an outer ditch, which served as a farmstead or small settlement during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. At Garryduff, the enclosing bank is stone-faced with a coursed rubble core, standing around four and a half feet high and up to twenty-one and a half feet wide, with a rock-cut fosse, or ditch, some six feet deep beyond it. The entrance faces east and splays outward from four to nine feet wide, with traces suggesting a timber gate once stood there. Two low standing stones are set inside the bank, one near the entrance and one to the west. Excavation revealed two distinct phases of occupation: the earlier phase contained the post-holes of at least two timber structures, one rectangular building measuring roughly twenty-one by ten feet; the later phase showed hearths and paving. The concentration and variety of craft activity led the scholar N. Edwards, writing in 1990, to propose that Garryduff I was not simply a farmstead but the base of a community whose primary occupation was specialised production. Neolithic flint assemblages recovered from the site indicate the ridge had drawn human activity long before the ringfort was built, pointing to a location that held its appeal across very different periods of prehistory and early history alike.