What left that trace was almost certainly trees, planted deliberately in a circle, and the fact that it looks, from above, like the kind of enclosure that archaeologists get excited about is precisely what makes it interesting. It is not prehistoric. It is, in all likelihood, a piece of Georgian garden design.

The distinction matters because the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced in Ireland in the nineteenth century and generally reliable at flagging ancient earthworks, do not mark this feature as an antiquity at all. Instead, they show it as a circular grove of trees, and the 1910 edition of the OS 25-inch map records it as a landscape feature, the kind of deliberate planting that wealthy landowners used to organise and ornament their grounds from the eighteenth century onwards. The working assumption is that the tree-ring dates to after 1700 and was associated with Redmondstown House, which sits about 310 metres to the west-northwest. A tree-ring of this kind, sometimes called a ring plantation, was a common element of designed landscapes in Ireland and Britain during that period; a grove arranged in a circle could serve as a shelter belt, a visual punctuation mark in open parkland, or simply an expression of the geometric taste that Georgian garden design favoured. The trees are gone now, but their root disturbance remains legible to cameras looking straight down.