In a pasture field on the demesne of Springfield Castle in County Limerick, a ringfort sits in the same ground as a ha-ha, that clever sunken wall designed to keep livestock out of a country house's formal grounds without interrupting the view. The outer face of the ha-ha runs along the line of the ringfort's counterscarp bank, the low outer ridge of earth that once reinforced the fort's defensive ditch. It is an accidental overlap of two eras, each one drawing a boundary in the landscape for entirely different reasons.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a family's home and immediate yard within a circular earthen bank and ditch. This example is a broadly circular area measuring 56 metres north to south and 59 metres east to west, set on a gentle east-facing slope. The enclosing bank survives, though it is considerably reduced; internally it rises only about 0.4 metres above the interior ground level, while externally it still reaches around 1.75 metres in places. Beyond it lies the fosse, the external ditch, running to about 3.5 metres wide, and beyond that the counterscarp bank. The southwestern and western sections of the main bank have been noticeably degraded, the result of cattle repeatedly crossing into the interior over many generations. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the national monuments database in August 2011.

The site lies within the grounds of Springfield Castle and is entirely under pasture, so access is a matter of private land rather than public right of way. For those with an interest in how landscape features from radically different periods can quietly overwrite one another, the detail worth looking for is precisely where the ha-ha's outer wall meets the old counterscarp to the southwest and north. The interior of the fort slopes gently downward toward the east, which would have been typical of a site chosen to catch morning light and aid drainage. The earthworks are low and require a careful eye rather than a dramatic first impression.