These tree-rings, sometimes called ring plantations, were a feature of improving landlord estates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the shaping of the landscape was considered as much a part of estate management as the draining of fields or the building of walls. The ring itself would typically enclose a small area, sometimes screening a feature of the estate, sometimes simply asserting a kind of aesthetic order on the countryside.

Beyond its classification as a designed landscape feature in the townland of Annagh, the available detail on this particular site is limited. What can be said is that such plantings were rarely accidental. They required forethought, labour, and an owner with both the means and the inclination to think in terms of decades, since the trees themselves would take years to reach any visual effect. In the Irish context, this kind of landscaping is most associated with the Anglo-Irish gentry of the Georgian and Victorian periods, and the survival of even a partial ring of mature trees in an agricultural landscape is notable, since many such features have been lost to land clearance or simple neglect over the intervening generations.