The ringfort at Thurlesbeg, set on a gentle north-west-facing slope above the River Arglo in County Tipperary, was planted with fir trees in its interior, apparently pressed into service as an ornamental element in the surrounding landscape. It is a fate that befell a surprising number of Irish ringforts during the Georgian and Victorian periods, when landowners with an eye for the picturesque occasionally found these circular enclosures convenient ready-made set-pieces.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks, and used as defended farmsteads roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The example at Thurlesbeg is a modest but reasonably complete specimen, enclosing a circular interior of twenty-six metres in diameter. The enclosing bank, built of earth and stone, survives best along its western to northern arc, where it still stands with a base width of four metres. Elsewhere it has been reduced to a low scarp, and the outer fosse, a shallow ditch running around the exterior, is also partially intact, reaching a depth of around 0.7 metres. A townland boundary cuts across the western side of the monument on a north-south axis, which accounts for some of the disturbance to the bank in that area. No original entrance feature is now visible, and a modern gap four metres wide has been cut through the northern bank at some later date.

The tree planting that gave the site its nineteenth-century second life is now among its principal problems. The roots of the whitethorn bushes, whitethorn trees, and conifers planted along the perimeter are actively causing damage to the bank itself. There is a certain irony in the fact that the very intervention intended to preserve or prettify the monument may prove, over time, to be more destructive than centuries of agricultural use. A second ringfort lies roughly 160 metres to the west, suggesting this corner of Thurlesbeg was once a more densely settled early medieval landscape than its present quiet grassland appearance would suggest.