It is about twenty metres across, defined by a low scarp and a water-filled fosse, that is, a surrounding ditch, fed by a spring to the south-west and drained by a stream to the south. The water still moves through it. The trees still stand. But what exactly it was built to be remains genuinely uncertain.

By the time the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was published in 1948, the feature was already marked as a circular tree-planted area roughly twenty-five metres in diameter, suggesting it had been a deliberate planting for some generations by that point. One possibility is that it began as a ringfort, the type of circular earthen enclosure built as a farmstead enclosure during the early medieval period in Ireland, and was later tidied up and incorporated into a designed landscape. The more likely explanation, however, is that it was created as an ornamental feature from the outset, associated with Abbeyview House, a nineteenth-century mansion that sits around a hundred and fifty metres to the north-west. Landowners of that period occasionally dressed up their grounds with follies, eye-catchers, and decorative earthworks, and a moated circular grove fed by a living spring would have made a quietly theatrical addition to a country estate's grounds.

The enclosure is poorly preserved today, and the distinction between a reshaped ancient monument and a purpose-built ornament may never be settled with certainty. That ambiguity is part of what makes it interesting: a small circular wood with water around it, sitting in a Galway field, belonging fully to neither the early medieval past nor the Victorian present.