The clearing measures around 41 metres on its longer axis, and the ground beneath it is uneven and rutted, sloping gently southward. What makes this patch of woodland quietly odd is not the tree itself but the deliberate intention that seems to have shaped its setting.

The 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records something more legible than what survives today: a solitary tree enclosed by a roughly circular wall, approximately 15 metres in diameter. This kind of enclosed specimen tree was a recognisable feature of designed landscapes attached to landed estates, where a single tree, sometimes a rare or sentimental variety, would be given its own low enclosure to mark it out from the surrounding grounds. By the time the site was examined more recently, the wall had vanished entirely beneath brambles and nettles so thick that no trace of the stonework could be found at all. The circular enclosure visible on the earlier map has, in effect, become a ghost, legible only in the gap the trees have left around its presumed centre.