This example at Garryduff in County Cork sits on a south-west-facing slope just below the crest of a ridge, roughly circular at twenty-nine metres across, and the layering of its defences suggests it once belonged to someone of considerable local standing. The more enclosures a ringfort carried, the higher the presumed status of its occupant, and triple-banked examples, known sometimes as trivallate raths, are comparatively rare in the Irish landscape.

A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, typically dating to somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries, and used as a defended homestead for a farming family or minor lord. Here the inner bank still stands nearly two metres high on its outer face, its crest now colonised by mature deciduous trees whose roots have helped preserve the shape of the earthwork over many centuries. The middle bank and the wide, flat-bottomed fosse separating it from the inner circuit are heavily overgrown with trees as well, giving the interior the feel of a small enclosed wood rather than a former living space. The outer bank and second fosse survive only along the north-east to north-north-west arc, the rest presumably lost to agriculture. Narrow breaks in the inner bank to the north-north-west and in the middle bank to the south-south-west may represent original entrance points. A later field fence running north to south cuts through the eastern side of the enclosure, and wherever it intersects the banks, gaps have been left on both sides, a quiet record of the practical compromises farmers have made with ancient earthworks for generations.