Even then it was marked as a feature roughly ten metres across. Today the copse has spread to approximately twenty metres in diameter and become thoroughly overgrown, which is perhaps why it tends to pass without comment. What it represents, though, is a particular kind of deliberate planting: a tree-ring, a circular arrangement of trees designed not for timber or shelter but as an ornamental element within a wider landscape.

The likely explanation for its existence sits about seventy metres to the north-west: Cloonfree House. Country houses of a certain period were commonly surrounded by designed landscapes in which water features, specimen trees, and planted enclosures were arranged to produce carefully composed views and a sense of cultivated order extending outward from the house itself. A circular copse positioned at the edge of a lough would have served exactly that kind of purpose, functioning as a focal point or framing device when seen from the house or its grounds. The fact that the feature appears on the 1915 map but seems to have attracted no earlier cartographic attention leaves its precise origins uncertain, though the association with the house is plausible enough to be the working assumption.

What remains on the ground is modest: an overgrown ring of trees on a loughside that gives little obvious indication of its designed origins. The gap between the mapped diameter of ten metres and the current spread of twenty metres suggests the planting has been left to its own devices for some considerable time, the original outline now blurred but not entirely lost.