The example at Horsemount in County Cork is a quiet but well-preserved specimen of the type, sitting on a north-facing slope in pasture and retaining enough of its original form to give a clear sense of how these enclosures once read in the landscape.

A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period in Ireland as a farmstead or settlement for a single family or small group. At Horsemount, the enclosure is roughly circular, measuring 30 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west. The boundary varies in character depending on where you stand: along the eastern to western arc, a proper earthen bank survives, rising about 1.8 metres on the interior face and 1.2 metres on the exterior. Elsewhere around the circuit, the boundary takes the form of a scarp, a cut or slope in the ground rather than a built-up bank, here reaching 2.2 metres in height. Someone at some point has added a narrow field fence along the top of the bank, adding another 0.8 metres to its profile. To the northeast, the fosse, the ditch that would originally have run outside the main boundary to reinforce the enclosure, survives as a shallow depression in the ground, softened by centuries of weathering and cultivation but still just legible if you know what to look for.