It enclosed a small turret, and together they formed one of those quietly theatrical gestures that 18th-century landowners liked to make across their demesnes. A tree-ring was exactly what the name suggests, a deliberate ring of planted trees used as an ornamental landscape feature, the kind of carefully composed view that an estate owner might have looked out upon from the house below, or walked to as a destination in itself.

The feature belonged to the demesne of Inch House, an 18th-century property that stood roughly 170 metres away on the same slope. By the time the first Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1839 to 1840, both the wooded circle and its turret were already present and clearly defined enough to be recorded. A century later, the revision of 1945 to 1946 still showed the ring, though the turret was by then marked as being in ruins. Inch House itself is gone, demolished at some point, and the designed landscape that once surrounded it has been erased just as completely. The construction of the Purcellsinch industrial estate removed both the tree-ring and the ruined turret, and a large factory now occupies the ground where they once stood. What the first OS surveyors carefully inked onto their six-inch sheets, and what some 18th-century hand planted and arranged on a Kilkenny hillside, survives now only in the cartographic record.