At Lissadrone in County Mayo, that confusion proved lasting enough to earn the feature a formal entry as a prehistoric enclosure, a classification it held for nearly a decade before anyone walked out to look at it properly. The circular arrangement of trees, roughly twenty-five metres across, sits on pasture land along the old approach to Lissadrone House, now a ruin, and from a distance, or from the flattened perspective of a nineteenth-century map, it reads convincingly as an ancient earthwork.

The mix-up is understandable. When the site was recorded in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, the evidence on hand was cartographic: the 1838 and 1922 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps both showed a circular, tree-planted feature, and circular enclosures in the Irish landscape are very often raths, the ringforts built as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period. It was only after field investigation in 1995 that the feature was correctly identified as a tree-ring, a deliberate ornamental planting used in designed landscapes to mark an approach, frame a view, or simply impose a degree of formality on open ground near a country house. The reclassification placed it firmly in the category of designed landscape rather than archaeology. What makes the site quietly interesting, though, is what sits forty-five metres to its north: an actual rath, a genuine early medieval enclosure. Whether the tree-ring was planted with any awareness of its prehistoric neighbour is not recorded, but the proximity of the two features, one ancient and earthen, one relatively recent and arboreal, gives the corner of this Mayo field an accidental layering of different human intentions.