Yet for well over a century, maps recorded a deliberate circle of trees standing in the landscape, roughly twenty metres across, almost certainly a tree-ring. These ornamental plantings, typically associated with the designed landscapes of country estates, were laid out as decorative features, sometimes to mark a boundary, sometimes simply to impose a sense of order and intention on the land around a house.

The feature sat within the demesne lands of Doonally House, whose main building lies around five hundred metres to the northwest. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1837, the circle was clearly depicted as a tree-covered area. By the 1912 edition of the same survey, it appeared as a partially tree-covered enclosure, still roughly circular, still about twenty metres in diameter, though without the hachures that would indicate any significant raised earthwork beneath. Aerial photography confirmed its presence from above even as it became less legible on the ground. Local information recorded in the late 1980s noted that the feature had been levelled during that decade, and there are now no visible surface remains whatsoever. What the 1837 cartographers carefully drew, and what generations of Sligo farmers would have known as a landmark, has been reduced entirely to flat pasture.