The plantation sits within what was once the demesne of Tullira, the east Galway estate whose grounds were designed with the kind of deliberate scenic arrangement typical of nineteenth-century landed estates. What complicates matters is that at some point between the first Ordnance Survey mapping of 1838, which recorded an unenclosed subcircular mixed tree plantation, and the edition of 1921, a wall appeared around it. Walls around tree clumps tend to suggest enclosures; enclosures in Ireland tend to suggest ringforts.

The confusion hardened into print in 1952, when McCaffrey catalogued the feature as a "very ruinous" circular stone fort, complete with a cautious question mark, noting a tree plantation in the interior and an enclosing wall concealed among the growth. A ringfort, roughly speaking, is an early medieval enclosed farmstead, typically circular and bounded by an earthen bank or a stone wall; they are genuinely common across the Irish countryside, which makes circular features in fields easy to misread. Subsequent examination found that what McCaffrey had described as a fort wall was simply a circular field wall, and nothing of archaeological significance was present. The current assessment is that this is most likely a designed landscape feature, a planted grove arranged for visual effect within a demesne, rather than any ancient monument.