The circle measures 22.4 metres across, levelled and defined by a wide, V-shaped fosse, which is the term for a ditch cut as part of a formal earthwork, and it sits on a gentle rise in pasture as though waiting to be explained. No entrance breaks its perimeter. The trees that once completed the picture have been removed entirely, leaving only the earthwork beneath.

The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded this feature clearly as a ring of trees, placing it firmly within the designed landscape tradition of an 18th- or 19th-century country estate. Doory Hall was the house at the centre of this demesne, and the tree-ring would have been one of several decorative or formal plantings typical of the period, when landowners arranged their grounds with circles, avenues, and clumps of trees as much for visual effect as for any practical purpose. Two adjacent earthworks in the same area were at one point interpreted as possible barrow graves, barrows being low burial mounds of prehistoric origin, which would have made for a rather different story. Given their position close to the hall, however, and the way all three features appear on period maps, the more grounded reading is that they belong to the same phase of deliberate landscaping. By 1976, faint traces of a bank at the outer edge of the fosse were still just about visible on the western side; those traces have since disappeared. Part of the northern arc of the fosse has been absorbed into a field boundary, which is how old earthworks tend to survive, quietly folded into the working landscape long after their original purpose has been forgotten.