The trees follow the inner edge of the bank so precisely that the planting appears almost ceremonial, though what has actually happened here is rather more prosaic: at some point, someone converted an early medieval ringfort into an ornamental tree-ring, using its ready-made circular form as a frame for planting.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is one of the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, a circular enclosure typically defined by an earthen bank and outer ditch, used as a farmstead or settlement during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Ballyhickey example measures just over thirty-three metres across and retains the essential features of its type: a bank with a notably high stone content, a wide shallow fosse (the surrounding ditch), and a clear entrance gap on the south-south-west side about two and a half metres wide. In the eastern quadrant, the inner face of the bank still shows visible stone revetment, the remains of a facing intended to hold the earthwork in shape. The monument has not fared well in recent centuries. Cattle grazing inside the enclosure has badly eroded the bank, which is now considerably denuded, and there is no grass left growing in the interior. A second round of conifer planting sits just inside the first, and a single tree stands in the centre.

What makes this site quietly revealing is what the Ordnance Survey recorded in 1840. On the first-edition six-inch map, the field boundaries immediately to the north and west of the enclosure show a deliberate kink outward, a small angular detour in the otherwise straight lines of the surrounding farmland. Whoever laid out those field boundaries went to the trouble of accommodating the ringfort rather than simply ploughing through it, suggesting a persistent, if informal, recognition that the enclosure was something worth working around, even if no one could quite say why.