It is not a fairy ring or an ancient earthwork, but something more deliberate and more Georgian: a tree-ring, one of the ornamental landscape features planted across the grounds of great eighteenth and nineteenth-century estates to give visual interest to otherwise unremarkable terrain. Where a wealthy landowner might commission a folly or a ha-ha, they might equally dot their parkland with these planted circles, small theatrical gestures visible from the house or from a carriage drive.

This particular ring sits on land that was formerly part of the Westport House estate, one of the principal demesnes in the west of Ireland. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 records it as an unenclosed circular ring of trees, open to the surrounding pasture. By later editions it appears as a sub-circular enclosure, roughly thirty to thirty-five metres in diameter, planted with trees, suggesting the ring had either been formalised or simply filled in over the intervening decades. A second tree-ring of the same type survives approximately two hundred and thirty metres to the west, hinting that these features were laid out as part of a broader designed landscape rather than as isolated whims.