When it was first entered into the Sites and Monuments Record in 1986, the feature was classified as an archaeological enclosure, the kind of designation that typically suggests a ringfort, a burial ground, or some other remnant of early medieval or prehistoric activity. The evidence used was cartographic and aerial photographic data from the early 1970s. What the records eventually acknowledged, however, is that this is a designed landscape feature, a deliberate piece of estate ornamentation rather than an ancient monument.

The enclosure measures roughly 75 metres north to south and 64 metres east to west, making it a substantial oval contained by a stone wall. At its centre sits a small knoll, a gentle rise in the ground that the wall frames and presents rather than simply surrounds. This kind of landscaping was characteristic of the improving estates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners across Ireland and Britain reshaped their demesnes with an aesthetic interest in borrowed naturalism, using walls, mounds, and plantings to create composed views across their properties. The knoll here would have functioned as a focal point within that broader designed landscape, the wall giving it a certain gravitas and enclosing it as a feature worth looking at. Hollywood Demesne sits in the rolling terrain of west Wicklow, and the undulating ground of the slope would have suited this kind of carefully arranged informality well.