But look at the land from the air, and a circular ghost emerges, roughly forty metres across, traced in the soil by the differential growth of crops above two concentric ditches buried just beneath the surface. This kind of feature, known as a cropmark, appears when buried earthworks affect how plants grow above them, producing visible rings or lines that only become legible at altitude. What makes this particular cropmark quietly interesting is that it was not always invisible. The earliest Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced in the nineteenth century, recorded it as a tree-ring, and the 1910 edition of the OS twenty-five-inch map showed it still. That means the enclosure was once a planted circle of trees, deliberately laid out as part of a designed landscape, before the trees were lost and the feature retreated underground.

Tree-rings were a common ornamental device in the grounds of Georgian and Victorian country houses, serving as eye-catchers, shelter belts, or simply as formal gestures in a composed landscape. Redmondstown House sits approximately two hundred and thirty metres to the west, close enough that this circular plantation almost certainly belonged to its demesne. The double-ditch construction beneath the ring, now only readable from aerial photographs, suggests the planting was given a fairly substantial earthwork foundation, though whether that earthwork was purpose-built for the trees or represents something older adapted for the purpose is not clear from what survives.