Raised mounds surrounded by water-filled ditches, with no visible entrance and a neat planting of trees on top, they have the look of ancient ring forts, yet their purpose was almost certainly decorative rather than defensive.

Each mound is a modest but deliberate construction. The example to the north-west of the house measures roughly 10.4 metres across and rises 1.4 metres above the surrounding ground, encircled by a wet fosse, essentially a water-filled ditch, about five metres wide at the top and 0.8 metres deep. A second, near-identical feature lies approximately 150 metres to the south-east, closer still to the house itself. The pairing is the telling detail. Genuine early medieval ring forts, which were typically farmstead enclosures, do not tend to come in matched sets arranged symmetrically around a country house. These were almost certainly designed landscape features, ornamental earthworks of the kind that became fashionable on Irish and British estates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners sometimes constructed artificial ruins, mounds, and follies to animate their parkland with a sense of age and romantic irregularity. The deliberate retention of standing water in the fosse and the absence of any entrance gap reinforce the impression of something built for effect rather than function.