These circular plantings, sometimes called ring plantations, were a feature of designed demesne landscapes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners shaped their estates not just with formal gardens but with deliberate arrangements of trees across fields and hillsides. A tree-ring typically served an ornamental purpose, marking a rise in the ground or a prominent point in the landscape with a circle of beech, oak, or ash, visible from the house and from the surrounding countryside alike.