A gently raised platform, roughly pear-shaped and about 24 metres across, sits enclosed by a worn bank and an outer fosse, which is a shallow ditch cut around the perimeter. The whole arrangement has the structural logic of a prehistoric enclosure, yet the classification it carries is carefully hedged: a designed landscape feature of "doubtful antiquity".

What this feature most likely represents is a tree-ring, a fashionable form of ornamental planting used on Irish and British estates during the 18th and 19th centuries. Landowners would arrange trees in a circular or near-circular formation on a prominent rise, partly for aesthetic effect and partly to signal the extent and cultivation of their demesne when viewed from below. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1911 records this spot simply as a grove of trees, with no suggestion of archaeological significance. The earthwork beneath, with its bank measuring roughly 3 metres wide and 0.8 metres high, and a fosse about 5.4 metres across, may have been thrown up to protect the root zone of the planted trees, or may have pre-existed the planting entirely. No entrance feature has been identified, which makes interpretation harder. The upslope side preserves the bank and fosse most clearly, where erosion has been less severe.

The site faces west, and the views in that direction across the Offaly lowlands would have made it a logical choice for a planted feature meant to be seen as much as to be seen from. Whether the earthwork is genuinely older than the 19th-century planting, or was constructed as part of the same designed scheme, remains unresolved.