No house stood inside it, no church, no burial ground; it was made purely to be looked at, or to look from. These plantation-era tree-rings were a form of designed landscape feature, planted on prominent rises so that the encircling canopy would read as a deliberate mark on the countryside, visible from the estate or farmhouse below. This one commands good views northward over the low-lying ground, which was almost certainly the point.

The feature does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, which suggests it post-dates that survey, but by the 1916 edition it is clearly recorded as a wooded subcircular enclosure. The earthwork itself is more substantial than a casual glance might suggest. A scarp, the term for a steep artificial slope or cut edge, runs around the base of the hillock, standing between 0.8 and 1 metre high at the southern side and noticeably more vertical than a natural slope would produce; it may originally have been faced with stones. The summit holds only a small level area, perhaps 10 to 15 metres across, with the ground dropping gently to the south by about 2 metres and more sharply to the north by roughly 3 metres. At some point a shallow quarry pit, around 10 metres in diameter, was cut into the north-western slope, and a section of the eastern scarp has also been disturbed. The trees shown on the 1916 map are gone entirely now, leaving only the shaped ground behind.