Somewhere in the townland of Lackandarra in County Waterford, a roughly circular patch of scrub sits on a gentle north-east-facing slope, easy to overlook and easier still to mistake for a natural feature of the land. It is, in fact, an early medieval ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that once defined the Irish rural landscape in its thousands. What sets this one apart is simply that it survives at all in recognisable form, its earthen bank still tracing a near-perfect circle measuring 39 metres north to south and 38 metres east to west.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. At Lackandarra, the bank survives to an internal height of around one metre and an external height of 1.2 metres, with a width of six metres at the eastern side. Beyond the bank, a fosse, the accompanying external ditch, is still present, though it has largely silted up over the centuries. The entrance, 4 metres wide, faces east-south-east, an orientation common to many ringforts and thought by some researchers to relate to the direction of the morning sun. The interior, rather than lying empty, contains agricultural sheds, which speaks to a continuity of practical use even if the original inhabitants would find the arrangement unrecognisable.