These deliberate plantings, known as a tree-ring, are the kind of feature that tends to be passed over in favour of more obviously dramatic monuments, yet they speak quietly to a tradition of ornamental estate design that shaped the Irish countryside from the seventeenth century onwards. Tree-rings were typically planted as visual punctuation in a designed landscape, sometimes encircling a mound or elevated point, sometimes simply imposing a geometric order on what might otherwise be unremarkable ground.