It is the kind of deliberate, formal arrangement that speaks of careful design, a landscape shaped to be experienced from a moving carriage or a slow walk, the trees punctuating the grounds at regular intervals like full stops in a sentence. By April 1992, when the site was physically inspected, almost all of them had been cleared away, leaving the OS map as the primary evidence that they ever existed.

Coole House itself, the former home of Lady Augusta Gregory, the writer and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, was demolished in 1941, and the wider demesne has since become a nature reserve. The circular enclosures were almost certainly ornamental landscape features associated with the house during its occupation, the kind of designed planting scheme common to Irish country estates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where avenues and approaches were considered as much a part of the architectural experience as the building at their end. Whether these particular enclosures date from the Gregory family's tenure or an earlier phase of the estate's development is not recorded, but their systematic layout, each a discrete circle with its own tree, suggests a unified design intention rather than piecemeal planting.