Tree-rings, sometimes called ring plantations, were a common feature of designed estate landscapes in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland, where landowners shaped their surroundings not just with formal gardens but with carefully placed woodland. A circle of trees planted on a rise could serve as an eye-catcher visible from a house, a windbreak, a marker of ownership, or simply an expression of aesthetic fashions imported from English landscape design. The effect, seen from a distance, is of a neat crown of growth that sits too precisely on the land to be entirely natural.