What looks at first glance like a designed landscape feature, a small ornamental tree ring of the kind planted on Irish demesne estates to add visual interest or shelter, turns out to be far more ambiguous. One enclosure, roughly D-shaped and measuring around 26 metres across, is barely legible today, indicated by two surviving trees. The second, a sub-rectangular area some 50 metres to its northeast, has been levelled entirely and leaves no visible trace.

Both features appear on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map and the OS Fair Plan as small, irregular tree-planted enclosures, and again on the revised 1913 twenty-five-inch map in their respective D-shaped and sub-rectangular forms. They sit 435 metres north of Rathcastle House, and for a long time were read simply as plantation features associated with the landscaping of that demesne. A 1981 field description noted two small enclosures side by side, one already largely gone, the other marked only by a few trees, and concluded that neither was likely to carry any archaeological significance. But an estate map from 1809, held in the National Library of Ireland, complicates that reading. The map, associated with the estate of Thomas Bannon, records two dwellings in precisely this area belonging to a John Sullivan. The current interpretation is that the tree-planted earthworks are not ornamental at all, but rather the softened remains of two post-1700 domestic structures, their outlines gradually absorbed into the landscape and eventually planted over, whether deliberately or incidentally, as the demesne was developed around them.

What remains on the ground today is the merest suggestion of one of those dwellings, held in place by two trees in a field that gives little else away. The other has gone completely.