The features are not the remnants of some ancient fort or field system but the deliberate work of estate designers, shaping the ground itself as part of a broader ornamental scheme. What makes them quietly curious is how thoroughly they were swallowed by their own setting: by the time the first Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were produced in 1838, the area had already been so heavily planted that the enclosure boundaries do not appear at all. The trees had, in effect, hidden the design almost before it could be recorded.

The complex consists of four distinct landscape features, and they come into clearer view on the OS six-inch second edition maps of 1885, by which point surveyors were able to mark them explicitly. Whether they were already in place by 1838, concealed beneath the planting, or added sometime between the two editions remains uncertain, though the former seems plausible given how established the woodland appears to have been at the earlier date. The site was formally classified as an earthwork in 1986, a designation based not on excavation but on cartographic and aerial photographic evidence, including aerial survey photography from 1973. Designed landscape features of this kind were a common element of eighteenth and nineteenth-century demesne culture in Ireland, where landowners shaped slopes, constructed enclosures, and managed plantations to create a particular visual and spatial experience within the estate grounds.