What makes it worth a second look is the layering of purposes it seems to represent: a circular form that may be ancient in origin, later pressed into service as a designed tree-ring, the kind of ornamental planting used by eighteenth and nineteenth-century landowners to punctuate their estates with visual interest.

The earliest firm evidence for the site as a deliberate planting comes from the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, which depicts it as a post-1700 tree-ring. Tree-rings of this type were a common feature of the improving landlord landscape, clusters of trees arranged in a circle to create focal points in parkland or to shelter a house from prevailing winds. What complicates the picture at Moydrum is the possibility that the circular form was not created from scratch in the eighteenth century but inherited from something considerably older. The dimensions and shape are consistent with a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. If that reading is correct, a landowner or estate manager at some point after 1700 recognised a ready-made earthwork and planted trees within or along its circuit, giving an ancient boundary a new and decorative function. The circle visible on aerial imagery taken between 2011 and 2013 suggests the outline has persisted into the present, even as the trees themselves have gone.