They marked it on their six-inch map as a circular enclosure, roughly thirty metres across, planted with trees. Today, that circle is gone, levelled into the surrounding pasture, and the field gives little away.

A tree-ring was a feature of designed demesne landscapes, the kind of ornamental or functional planting that landowners used to impose order and aesthetic intention on their estates from the eighteenth century onwards. Unlike a natural copse or a field boundary, a tree-ring was deliberate in its geometry, and its circular form was often visible from a house, serving as a focal point in the wider composition of the grounds. The proximity of this particular site to Heathfield House is the strongest clue to its origins. Denis Power, who compiled the record in 2011, noted that the feature was likely part of that demesne, which would place it within the managed landscape of a landed estate whose owners shaped the hillside with the same attention they would have given to a walled garden or an avenue of trees.

The site sits in pasture now, and the levelling means there is no visible trace of the original planting. What remains is essentially a location and a cartographic ghost, the kind of detail that rewards those who cross-reference old Ordnance Survey maps with the ground beneath their feet. The 1841 six-inch series, digitised and freely available through various Irish mapping archives, shows the enclosure clearly enough. Walking the slope with that image in mind, and with Heathfield House somewhere in view, is probably the closest a visitor will get to understanding what the tree-ring once looked like from the house, and what the house once looked like framed by it.