What that circle represents, however, is not entirely clear, and that ambiguity is most of what makes it interesting.

The site sits within the former demesne of Ballinlass House, the managed landscape that would once have surrounded a country estate. Tree-rings of this kind were occasionally planted as ornamental features within such demesnes, giving a formal, geometric quality to the grounds. But the earthworks underneath tell a slightly different story. What survives on the ground is an arc of a rounded earthen bank, about a metre wide and just under a metre high, visible along the southern side. Outside the bank, a band of darker vegetation may trace the line of a fosse, the shallow ditch that would typically accompany a ringfort. A ringfort, to be clear, is a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, common across early medieval Ireland and used as a farmstead or place of status. The possibility here is that whoever planted the tree-ring was not creating something from nothing, but was instead landscaping an existing ancient monument, folding an old ringfort into the aesthetic grammar of the demesne. This was not an unusual impulse among estate owners in Ireland; a prehistoric or early medieval earthwork could lend a pleasingly antiquarian air to a designed landscape.

The bank and its possible fosse are all that remain legible on the ground today, the trees long since thinned or gone, the demesne itself a former thing.