At this ringfort in Lickfinn, County Tipperary, a watercourse enters the outer ditch at the north, curves around the western side of the enclosure, and exits again at the south, effectively lending natural drainage to what would otherwise be a purely man-made barrier. It is an unusual arrangement, and one that suits the setting: the fort sits on a south-west facing slope of waterlogged upland grassland, poorly drained and subject to the kind of persistent wet that makes earthworks simultaneously difficult to build and, in some ways, easier to preserve.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are among the most common monuments in the Irish landscape. They were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1100 AD, their earthen banks and ditches defining a household's space rather than a purely military perimeter. This one measures roughly 35 metres north to south and 24 metres east to west, enclosed by an earthen bank and a waterlogged outer fosse, which is the ditch or trench running around the exterior. A possible entrance gap, about 2.3 metres wide, sits at the east. The bank survives well from the north, around to the east and south, though elsewhere it has been worn down to little more than a scarp. Three cattle gaps have been cut through the bank at the north, north-east, and south-east, and there is visible damage to the external face of the bank at the north-east and east from livestock trampling over time.

What makes the shape of this fort particularly interesting is that it was not always as irregular as it appears today. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century, shows it as a more conventional circular enclosure, with the stream simply running along the western side. At some point after that survey was made, the western side of the monument was recut and the western quadrant reshaped, giving it the slightly lopsided outline it has now. Whether that was deliberate land management, agricultural convenience, or something else entirely, the notes do not say. The stream still follows its old course, indifferent to the changes made above it.