The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 records the spot as an unenclosed circular plantation of mixed trees, roughly fifty metres across. By the time the 1920 edition was drawn, the trees were gone and the feature was depicted instead as a plain circular enclosure. Today, no visible surface trace survives at all.

What the circle actually was remains an open question. It may have been a rath, the type of circular earthwork, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, that was built in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead enclosure and which remains one of the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside. Alternatively, it may have originated as a deliberate landscape feature connected to Dalystown House, which stands roughly two hundred metres to the south-east. Country houses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently incorporated ornamental plantations, circular copses, and other designed elements into their demesne grounds, and a ring of mixed trees would not have been out of place in such a scheme. The two possibilities are not entirely incompatible; a pre-existing earthwork could have been planted up as part of a later landscape design, with the trees eventually cleared and the underlying structure allowed to fade. The cartographic record does not resolve the question, only preserves it.