What makes it quietly curious is the question of what it actually was, and how quickly the evidence dissolved.

A tree-ring is a designed landscape feature, a deliberate planting of trees in a circular arrangement, typically associated with demesne or estate landscaping from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1836, this feature appeared as a circular copse roughly 30 metres in diameter, nothing more. By 1955, however, when it was recorded in an archaeological context, something more structural had emerged: a circular platform of the same diameter, defined by a fosse, essentially a shallow surrounding ditch, with a top width of around 2.5 metres, an internal depth of approximately 0.9 metres, and an external depth of about 0.2 metres. A few tree stumps were still visible at that point. Whether the earthwork platform beneath the trees was an older feature that the planting had been laid over, or simply the result of the trees' root system and clearance over time, is not entirely clear. What does seem likely is that the circular planting was intentional, an element of designed grounds associated with the nearby house. By 2005, the visible profile of the earthwork had been removed entirely, leaving the 1836 map and the 1955 field record as the main evidence that anything was ever there at all.