Somewhere in the gently rolling pastureland of Windfield Demesne in County Galway, a small circular grove of trees once stood, enclosed within some kind of boundary feature, planted deliberately as part of the designed landscape of a country estate. The trees are gone. The enclosing element has vanished. The ground gives nothing away.

The feature was recorded on the Ordnance Survey 1:2500 plan surveyed between 1912 and 1916, where it appears as a roughly circular enclosed tree copse, approximately twenty metres in diameter. Designed landscape features of this kind were common elements of demesne planting in Ireland, where landowners shaped their grounds with ornamental copses, shelter belts, and carefully placed clumps of trees that were as much about visual effect as practicality. At Windfield, this was not a one-off impulse: the same maps record thirteen other similar features across the demesne, suggesting a coherent and deliberate scheme for the grounds. What that scheme looked like in full, who designed it, or when it was first laid out, the surviving record does not say. By the time the Ordnance Survey revisited the area in the early twentieth century, the framework was there to be mapped; by now, even that framework has gone.