To an untrained eye, or even to a reasonably informed one, a ring of trees following a curved earthen boundary can look very much like one of Ireland's thousands of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period typically consisting of a raised circular area surrounded by one or more banks and ditches. It is an easy mistake to make, and in this instance it was made by someone with genuine expertise.

In 1983, Paddy Healy included the Woodside feature in a report prepared for Dublin County Council by An Foras Forbartha, the national body for physical planning and environmental research that operated in Ireland from the 1960s until its dissolution in 1987. Healy recorded it as a possible ringfort, which would have made it a site of some archaeological significance given how rapidly Dublin's suburban fringe was expanding at the time and how many such monuments were being lost to development pressure. Subsequent assessment, however, reached a different conclusion. The feature was re-evaluated and considered to be a tree ring, meaning a planting scheme, almost certainly deliberate, in which trees were arranged in a circular or curved pattern as part of a designed landscape rather than as the remnant of an ancient enclosure.

Tree rings of this kind are not uncommon in the grounds of eighteenth and nineteenth century estates, where landscape designers used curved plantings to create vistas, mark boundaries, or simply to impose a sense of geometry on a pastoral setting. The Woodside area of County Dublin would be consistent with that kind of designed rural environment. For anyone visiting, the feature is modest by any measure and requires a willingness to look carefully at the arrangement of the trees rather than the trees themselves. The interest lies less in what is there and more in the question of what it was briefly thought to be, and how close a planted landscape can come, in outline at least, to the signature of something far older.