While similar features once dotted the landscape around Newtown House, this is the only one that survived into the twentieth century, and it survives still. That alone sets it apart from its vanished companions.

The copse appears on the 1836 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, part of a cluster of comparable features in the vicinity of Newtown House. By the time the 1908 edition of the same map was produced, the others had gone; this one remained, recorded as a hachured feature, the mapmaker's shorthand for something with a degree of relief or boundary definition. It is considered likely to be an ornamental tree-ring, a category of designed landscape feature associated with the managed grounds of Irish country houses. Tree-rings of this kind were typically planted as visual accents within estate landscapes, providing focal points in open ground or framing views from the house. The site sits in a natural hollow, with higher ground rising to the west, east-northeast, and south, a sheltered position that would have suited deliberate planting and given the feature a degree of presence within its immediate surroundings.