7 metres wide, now serves cattle rather than people, and that small detail says a great deal about what happens to early medieval enclosures when farmland absorbs them over centuries. This ringfort in Garryfine, County Limerick sits in gently undulating pasture and has been quietly subsiding into the agricultural landscape around it for a very long time.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they are earthwork rather than stone constructions, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, broadly dating from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. This example is a bivallate rath, meaning it has two concentric earthen banks rather than one, with a fosse, or ditch, running between them roughly 1.5 metres wide. The inner bank still stands to an external height of around 1.9 metres and is lined with trees, which gives it a certain presence from a distance. The outer bank is more variable: well preserved along the north-west to north-east arc, where it reaches an external height of 1.2 metres, but severely cut back along the south-west to north-west side, where a field boundary has truncated both the bank and the outer edge of the fosse. The site was recorded and compiled by Denis Power, with notes uploaded in August 2011.

The interior, roughly 26 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, slopes gently downward toward the south and is largely covered by overgrowth, particularly dense at the northern end. Just west of centre there is an oval hollow measuring approximately 3 metres by 4.6 metres and about 0.6 metres deep, the origin of which the survey notes do not specify but which is a feature worth looking for. Access to the interior now comes through that cattle gap in the north-west, so the banks are being regularly disturbed at that point. Anyone visiting should expect a working farm setting, with the earthworks embedded in ordinary pasture rather than set aside as a formal monument.