What makes it quietly odd is the gap between what it once appeared to be and what it became: a formally arranged space, complete with trees planted deliberately around its perimeter and a pond close by to the south-west, that was later recorded on maps simply as a small field, as though whatever purpose had shaped it had been forgotten.

The earliest reliable picture of the site comes from the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1839, which shows a rectangular area measuring roughly 40 metres north to south and 54 metres east to west. The trees along its circumference and the pond immediately adjacent suggest something more considered than a casual enclosure, though whether it served a formal garden function, a demesne purpose, or something earlier is not recorded. By the time the OS six-inch map was revised in 1947, that careful arrangement had been reduced on paper to an ordinary small field, the pond no longer noted, the planting no longer remarked upon. The vegetation on the ground now tells a similar story of gradual erasure.