Completely levelled now, it sits close to a cluster of tree-rings associated with Toberdaly House, and that proximity has quietly shifted how the feature is understood. What might once have been assumed to be an ancient ringfort, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind built across Ireland from the early medieval period, may in fact be something altogether more deliberate and decorative: a designed element of an eighteenth or nineteenth-century demesne landscape.

The ambiguity runs deep. When the Ordnance Survey produced its first edition six-inch maps of Ireland in the nineteenth century, the feature was marked cautiously as a possible earthwork, which suggests that even then the ground offered little certainty. Its position on the crest of a rise is exactly where an early medieval ringfort would typically be placed, commanding the surrounding land and offering some natural defensibility. But ringforts were not in the habit of appearing in clusters alongside country houses, whereas tree-rings, circular plantings used by estate designers to create visual interest and break the flatness of a demesne, were common devices in the landscaping fashions associated with Georgian and Victorian Ireland. The Toberdaly House connection pulls the feature away from prehistory and towards the drawing room, suggesting that what looks like an ancient monument may have been a deliberate piece of landscape theatre, shaped to be seen from the house or to frame a view from the grounds.