The site sits roughly 200 metres northeast of Mullaghmore House, close enough to have been shaped by whoever managed that estate, yet the circular form and its elevated position on a hilltop invite a second look.

The cartographic record is the main source of evidence here, and it is an ambiguous one. The circular wood does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1834, but by the 1907 edition it is clearly shown, attached to a broader east-west ornamental wood that ran along the northern boundary of the Mullaghmore House demesne. That ornamental planting was a common feature of improving landlords in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, used to frame views, shelter grounds, and signal a certain aesthetic sensibility. Part of the enclosure's perimeter has since been absorbed into a field bank running roughly north-north-east to south-south-east, with a chord of about 60 metres, which suggests the landscape has been reorganised around it over time. The absence from the earlier map does not rule out an older origin: a tree-ring, a circular plantation deliberately placed over a pre-existing earthwork, would not necessarily have been visible or legible to the surveyors of the 1830s if the feature had been neglected or overgrown. Whether the circular form reflects eighteenth-century landscape design, an ancient enclosure, or some layering of both remains an open question.