These are deliberate plantings of trees arranged in a circular or near-circular formation, created not by nature but by design, typically during the eighteenth or nineteenth century when landowners across Ireland and Britain shaped their demesnes according to fashionable ideas about the picturesque and the ornamental. The tree-ring at Ballygiblin, in County Cork, belongs to this tradition of purposeful landscape shaping, where a stand of trees was used to mark, shelter, or ornament a particular point in a designed estate setting.