For over a century it showed up faithfully on Ordnance Survey maps, first on the 1841 six-inch sheet and again on the 1923 revision, each time as a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres in diameter with trees growing inside it. Aerial surveyors and map-readers might easily have logged it as a ringfort or some other ancient earthwork. The reality, as far as anyone can now tell, was probably something more deliberate and ornamental: a tree-ring, which is essentially a plantation of trees arranged in a circle within a defined earthen boundary, often created in the eighteenth or nineteenth century as a designed feature of the landscape rather than as a defensive or ritual structure.

The site sat atop a gradual rise in pasture ground, a position that would have given any planting there a certain visibility across the surrounding fields. The enclosure was bounded by a fosse, a shallow ditched depression around five metres wide, with an external earthen bank reaching a maximum height of about 1.6 metres, and an entrance on the western side. According to the landowner, who provided much of what is now known about the site, the enclosure and the adjoining field boundaries to the northwest and east were levelled in 1977. In the years that followed, the interior was deep-ploughed on several occasions, and large holes were dug to dispose of the fallen trees. Denis Power, who compiled the record uploaded in August 2011, noted the uncertainty over whether this was a tree-ring or an ancient enclosure, and that ambiguity has never been fully resolved.

There is little to see on the ground today. The levelling and subsequent ploughing have removed any surface trace of the bank and fosse, and the trees are long gone. What remains is a slight rise in an ordinary-looking field, the kind of gentle elevation that only becomes meaningful once you know what the maps once showed. For anyone curious about designed landscapes of the post-medieval period in Ireland, the site is worth knowing about as an example of how such features were recorded, lost, and then imperfectly recovered through local memory. The general area around Ballynacally in County Limerick is accessible by road, though the field itself is private farmland, and any visit would require the landowner's permission.