The ring is defined by a wide, round-bottomed fosse, the kind of shallow ditch that survives well in permanent grassland, and the interior is crossed by cultivation ridges suggesting the ground was worked at some point after the enclosure was formed. It looks, at first glance, like the sort of feature that might attract speculation about burial mounds or ancient ritual, and indeed it has.

The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the site clearly as a circular plantation of trees, a deliberate ornamental feature placed on a gentle rise within the designed landscape surrounding Doory Hall. The trees are now gone, leaving only the earthwork beneath. Two adjacent earthworks in the same area were at one point considered alongside this one as possible components of a barrow cemetery, a barrow being a mounded prehistoric grave. The proximity of all three features to the hall, their appearance on the early nineteenth-century mapping, and the physical character of what survives on the ground all point firmly toward deliberate landscape design rather than prehistoric funerary use. The fashionable estates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries commonly employed circular tree clumps and ring plantations as focal points in pastoral layouts, giving distant views a sense of composition and enclosure without the formality of formal gardens.

What remains today is a quiet, grass-covered circle in a working pasture, stripped of the trees that once gave it its original purpose and visual effect. The fosse that defined the planting is the most legible part of what survives, and the cultivation ridges inside it suggest the ground has had more than one use since the hall's heyday.