What the land now shows as ordinary grazing field was, at some point in the past, a carefully arranged circle of trees, the kind of ornamental planting that appeared on the estates and demesnes of improving landlords who wanted their grounds to look considered, composed, and pleasingly irregular in the fashionable eighteenth or nineteenth century manner.

The earliest cartographic evidence comes from the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where the feature appears as a sub-circular copse, a tight cluster of trees arranged in a ring. By the time the Ordnance Survey resurveyed the area at the larger twenty-five inch scale in 1911, the representation had shifted slightly: the feature was now drawn as an oval enclosure defined by two sets of hachures indicating a fosse, that is, a ditch or earthen depression running around the perimeter. The change in how it was recorded may reflect how the feature had aged and altered over those intervening decades, the trees thinning or gone, the underlying earthwork becoming more apparent. What the two maps together suggest is a planted ring, probably set within or around a low raised or ditched bank, of the sort used as an ornamental landscape element rather than any defensive or agricultural purpose. Such tree-rings were a common enough flourish in designed demesne landscapes, giving visual punctuation to a field or parkland view. The monument has since been levelled entirely and is no longer visible at ground level.