It was the kind of feature that appears in eighteenth and nineteenth century designed landscapes across Ireland and Britain, where landowners planted trees in formal geometric patterns, sometimes as ornamental eye-catchers, sometimes as shelter belts, and sometimes for reasons that have since been entirely forgotten.

The ring was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, marked as a sub-circular feature densely covered in trees. By the time the revised edition was produced in 1907, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, suggesting the trees were cleared sometime during the intervening decades. What the map could not preserve, the soil quietly did. The circle has since reappeared as a crop-mark visible on aerial photography, the buried outline of the old tree-ring leaving its trace in the differential growth of whatever now grows above it. Crop-marks form when buried features such as ditches, pits, or disturbed soil affect the moisture and nutrients available to surface vegetation, causing it to grow taller or shorter, greener or paler, in patterns that only become legible from above.