The one at Garrysallagh, in County Westmeath, does the opposite: it occupies a hollow between two ridges running northeast to southwest, tucked into the grassland as though the builders were more interested in shelter than visibility. A second ringfort lies only eighty metres to the north-northeast, which raises the obvious question of how two enclosures ended up so close together, and what relationship, if any, existed between them.

The enclosure itself is sub-circular in plan, roughly twenty-five metres across from north to south, and is defined by an earthen bank and a deep external fosse, the fosse being the ditch dug around the outside of the bank to reinforce the boundary and make the whole structure harder to breach. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they use earthen construction rather than stone, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, generally associated with the period between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. At Garrysallagh, the bank survives best along the north-northwest to northeast arc, where it retains something of its original profile, while elsewhere it has been worn down to a scarp, a low slope where the original height has been lost. The fosse is most clearly defined on the western and north-northwestern sides, though someone at some point dug a large quarry hole into it on the west, removing material and in the process damaging one of the better-preserved sections. At the southeast, there are hints of a causewayed entrance, a gap left in the fosse where a narrow strip of unexcavated ground would have allowed people and animals to cross into the enclosure, along with a corresponding depression in the scarp. The interior is slightly dished, sloping gently from north to south.