They look, at first glance, like the remains of something ancient, perhaps a ring fort or a ceremonial enclosure. They are neither. These are tree-rings, a feature of post-medieval designed landscapes in which a circular earthwork was constructed not for defence or ritual, but purely for planting trees in an arrangement considered pleasing to the eye of an estate owner.

This particular ring measures roughly 7.6 metres across internally, enclosed by an earthen bank about 1.3 metres wide and standing 1.7 metres high on the interior side, with a shallow external fosse, essentially a ditch, running around the outside. At each of the four cardinal points, north, south, east, and west, a deciduous tree was planted. Only stumps survive now at the northern and western positions. The group of three rings at Drumdoney is thought to date from after 1700, placing them firmly in the era of formal and landscape gardening that reshaped Irish estates through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tellingly, none of the three appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map surveyed in 1837, which may suggest they were already in decline or obscured by that point, or simply that the surveyors did not consider them worth marking. The drumlin itself, one of the rounded glacial hills that ripple across much of Ulster and north Connacht, would have made a natural stage for such a composed arrangement, visible from the house and grounds below.