Look more closely, and the story turns out to be considerably more mundane, and in its own way more interesting for that.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records nothing at this location, no earthwork, no monument, no feature of any archaeological note. By the time the 1910 twenty-five-inch edition was produced, however, a grove of trees had appeared, mapped not as an antiquity but simply as an irregular cluster of planting. The current consensus is that this tree-ring dates from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century and was planted deliberately to enclose an area of marsh land. The practice of using planted groves to define, drain, or shelter low-lying wet ground was not unusual in the Irish landscape of that period, when landowners sometimes imposed a degree of formal or semi-formal organisation on otherwise unworkable terrain. What survives at Ballinlig is the vegetative outline of that effort, the trees themselves forming an earthwork of sorts through their root systems and accumulated growth, long after whatever practical purpose prompted their planting has been forgotten.