Designed landscape - tree-ring, Rathmoyle, Co. Roscommon

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Designed Landscapes

Designed landscape – tree-ring, Rathmoyle, Co. Roscommon

On a flat stretch of County Roscommon, there is a low earthen ring where a small wood once stood.

The trees are gone now, replaced by grass and old stumps, but the outline of the planting survives as a subrectangular bank, roughly 35 by 40 metres, with a shallow outer drain still legible in the ground. It is the kind of feature that passes for nothing in particular until you consider what it was made for.

This is a tree-ring, a designed landscape element associated with the grounds of Rathmoyle House, which sits about a kilometre to the north-north-east and would have had a clear line of sight to the enclosure across level ground. Tree-rings of this kind were ornamental plantings, typically established by estate owners during the eighteenth or nineteenth century to punctuate a view, mark a boundary, or simply demonstrate that the land around a house had been shaped with intention. The planting here was polygonal in form, according to the 1929 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the only historical mapping on which it appears as a wooded enclosure. By the time the site was examined on the ground, the trees had long since gone, leaving only the bank, between 0.2 metres high on the interior and 0.8 metres on the exterior, with some scrub and the remnant drain around its edge. The asymmetry between interior and exterior height suggests the bank was thrown outward during construction, perhaps to encourage drainage or simply as a byproduct of digging the surrounding ditch.

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Pete F
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