These formations were a favoured tool of eighteenth-century estate planners, used to create visual punctuation across parkland, to frame views, or simply to impose a sense of order and intention on a stretch of ground that might otherwise read as undifferentiated pasture.

Portumna Demesne was associated with the Burke family, later the de Burgh Earls of Clanricarde, whose castle at Portumna is one of the more significant early seventeenth-century fortified houses surviving in Ireland. The wider demesne, developed and refined over subsequent centuries, reflects the kind of landscape design thinking that became fashionable among the Anglo-Irish gentry, borrowing from English and Continental traditions of parkland planning. Tree-rings and clumps were standard elements in this vocabulary, intended to be read from a distance, their geometry softened over time as the trees matured and individual forms began to merge into a collective canopy.