Is it an ancient enclosure, a remnant of a landscaped tree-ring, or something in between? The Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1837 not as an antiquity but as a sub-rectangular tree-plantation, lying just south of the avenue leading to the house, some 170 metres to the northwest. By the 1911 edition of the larger-scale OS map, it had transformed, at least on paper, into a roughly semi-circular earthwork, intersected by a field boundary cutting across its south-eastern quadrant. That shift in appearance, from plantation to earthwork over the course of a few decades of mapmaking, gives a sense of how thoroughly this feature has resisted easy classification.

When surveyors visited in 1972, they found an enclosure of approximately 36.5 metres in diameter that was almost entirely levelled. What remained was a poorly preserved arc of earthen bank, about 2.5 metres wide and just over a metre in height internally, curving from the north-east around through east and south to the south-south-west. The rest of the enclosing element, visible on the 1911 map running from south-south-west around through west and north, had disappeared entirely, a disappearance confirmed again by aerial photography taken in November 2011, which showed no surface trace of it whatsoever. A ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, lies around 250 metres to the north-north-east, which might suggest ancient activity in the broader landscape, but the earthwork itself is thought more likely to be a post-1700 designed landscape feature, the kind of ornamental planting arrangement that Georgian-era landowners used to give their demesnes a sense of structured, picturesque order. The arc of bank that survives may simply be the remnant of a raised bed or boundary associated with that plantation, gradually mistaken for something older as the trees vanished and the earthwork weathered into ambiguity.