The trees are not planted for ornament; they trace the perimeter of an early medieval ringfort, a rath, which is the term used for an enclosed farmstead of the kind built in Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts typically consisted of a raised circular area surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and served as defended homesteads for farming families. This one, in the townland of Ballygubba North, sits about seventy metres north of the boundary with Tankardstown North, absorbed into working farmland but never quite erased.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, recorded at that stage as a raised circular area in the landscape. By the time the more detailed twenty-five-inch edition was produced in 1897, surveyors noted a circular feature of approximately twenty-five metres in diameter, defined by a scarp, which is essentially a slope or edge marking where the raised interior drops away, accompanied by a drainage ditch running from the south, around the west and north, and continuing to the north-east. The drainage arrangement suggests the land around it was actively managed even then, the surrounding pasture being worked while the monument itself remained as a slight eminence. Aerial photographs taken by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in September 2002 and January 2003 show the circular outline still clearly readable, delimited by the ring of trees that has come to define it.

A Google Earth image from September 2020 confirms the tree-lined circle is still visible, with a noticeable gap on the eastern side. Because the site sits within reclaimed agricultural land, there is no formal public access or visitor infrastructure, and the monument is best appreciated from aerial imagery or by studying the hedgerow pattern from a nearby road. The gap at the east is consistent with an original entrance, a common feature of raths, though the notes do not confirm this specifically. Anyone with an interest in early medieval settlement patterns in the Shannon region will find the Ordnance Survey mapping of the area, available through the OSi historic map viewer, a useful complement to what remains on the ground.