These circular or oval plantings, sometimes called tree-rings, were a feature of designed landscapes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, typically used to shelter a house, ornament a demesne, or signal ownership and cultivation in a period when improving landlords reshaped the countryside to reflect Enlightenment ideals of order and productivity. What makes Ballinlass worth pausing over is the particular weight of that name. In 1820, the townland of Ballinlass was the site of one of the more thoroughly documented clearances in the west of Ireland, when the Gerrard estate removed the entire settled community, some sixty families, to consolidate the land for grazing. The tree-ring that remains sits in that cleared ground, a landscaping gesture layered over a landscape that had already been unmade.