The one at Lisquinlan in County Cork is a quietly particular example, sitting in pasture on a north-facing slope, its circular enclosure measuring roughly 34.5 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south. A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically dating from somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries, built to shelter a family and their livestock rather than to serve any grand military purpose. The enclosure here takes the form of an earthen bank standing about 1.25 metres high, with an external fosse, a defensive ditch, still detectable to a depth of around half a metre on the northern and southern sides.

What gives this particular site a small measure of character is the way the land behaves inside it. The interior does not sit level but slopes downward toward the north, which means the original inhabitants would have lived and worked on ground that tilted gently away from them, with the bank to the south standing at its most effective against the slope and the northern side more dependent on the ditch for definition. Whether this was simply the most convenient piece of ground available, or whether a north-facing position offered some practical advantage now difficult to reconstruct, is not recorded. The earthwork survives in pasture, which has helped preserve it; ploughed land is far less forgiving to low earthen monuments of this kind.