Designed landscape - tree-ring, Rathmoyle, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Designed Landscapes
On a south-facing slope in Rathmoyle, County Roscommon, there is a near-perfect circle in the landscape that most people would walk past without a second thought.
Roughly 44 metres across from east to west, it is outlined by a hedge and a shallow ditch, the ground inside now covered in grass and rushes, with a scattering of tree stumps the only real clue that something deliberate once stood here.
The feature belongs to a tradition of designed landscapes, the deliberate shaping of grounds around country houses and estates for aesthetic or ornamental effect, common in Ireland from the eighteenth century onward. Tree-rings of this kind were typically planted as shelterbelts, eye-catchers, or simply as a way of imposing geometry on a hillside. What makes this one quietly interesting is how completely it has faded. By 1929, when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch map, the circular wooded area was still distinct enough to be marked; today the trees are gone, leaving only their stumps and the faint earthwork of the enclosing ditch, no more than ten to twenty centimetres deep in places, to suggest the original planting. The map record is the last moment at which this feature appears as something whole and functioning, which makes it something of a ghost, visible in the landscape only if you already know what you are looking for.