It is an easy mistake to make from a distance: a low rise in the land, a circular outline, the suggestion of age and purpose. But the feature turns out to be something rather more deliberate, and considerably more recent.

When the antiquarian Knox wrote it up in 1917 to 1918, he noted a small rath, much altered for ornamental purposes, measuring 48 feet by 36 feet. Closer inspection revealed something different altogether. The grove sits on a gentle rise of roughly a metre above the surrounding land, and within it runs a circular pathway, edged by a low wall, leading to a seating area at the centre. The whole arrangement points to a designed landscape feature of nineteenth or early twentieth century date, the kind of ornamental garden conceit that was fashionable among country house estates of that era, where a wooded mound with a secluded seat offered a retreat within the grounds. What Knox took for an ancient earthwork had likely been shaped, or reshaped, with that kind of leisure in mind.

What makes the place quietly curious is precisely that layering of misidentification. Something built or adapted for afternoon sitting was catalogued as a relic of early medieval Ireland, and it took a physical inspection to untangle the two. The circular form, so characteristic of the ringfort tradition, had done its work on the imagination before anyone walked inside.