Tree-rings of this kind, sometimes called ring plantations, were a feature of estate landscapes in Ireland from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, typically planted on low rises or at field boundaries to create visual anchors in an otherwise open countryside. They were ornamental in purpose, though the timber they produced was sometimes practical too, and their circular form often signals the presence of something older beneath or within, whether a rath, a burial mound, or simply a rise in the ground that caught a landowner's eye.

The specific history of this particular planting at Ballyglooneen has not been fully documented, and the notes available on it are sparse. What can be said is that designed landscapes of this type were common features of improving estates, where landlords reshaped their demesnes according to fashions influenced by English landscape gardening. The deliberate geometry of a tree-ring, visible from a distance and planted with enough density to form a canopy, was a signal of order and cultivation imposed on the land. In Connacht, where such features survive, they often outlast the estates that created them by a considerable margin, the trees persisting long after the house, the walls, and the records have gone.