It was not a windbreak, not a boundary marker, not a remnant of older woodland. It was, as far as anyone can tell, purely ornamental, one of four such features arranged across the demesne landscape and designed to be looked at.

The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most detailed surveys of the Irish countryside ever undertaken, recorded all four of these circular copses on the Windfield estate. This particular example measured roughly 36 metres in diameter and was unenclosed, meaning there was no wall or ditch around it, just a ring of trees sitting in the open field. Planned tree groupings of this kind were a common feature of demesne design in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners across Ireland and Britain arranged their grounds according to fashionable landscape aesthetics, placing copses, water features, and ornamental plantings to create composed views from the house and its approaches. Whether Windfield's four circles were laid out simultaneously, or accumulated over time, the notes do not say.

By May 2012, aerial photography showed that the trees had already been cleared. The circle that once gave the spot its quiet visual logic is gone, leaving only pasture and the faint trace of its presence on an old map.