Designed landscape feature, Garadice, Co. Leitrim

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Designed Landscapes

Designed landscape feature, Garadice, Co. Leitrim

In the pasture north of Garadice House, a circular earthwork sits quietly in undulating ground, half-forgotten among mature trees.

It is roughly 50 metres across, defined by a broad earthen bank with narrow ditches on both the inside and outside, and it was never a fort or a ring-barrow in any conventional sense. It was designed to be looked at, walked through, and perhaps admired from a distance, part of the ornamental landscape that once surrounded a late seventeenth-century country house on the shores of Garadice Lough in County Leitrim. The feature remained largely unnoticed until satellite imagery began making such things legible from above, and it was an observer studying Google Earth imagery in 2010 who first flagged what was visible in the fields.

The land here has a particular origin. A grant of almost 1,000 acres at Garadice was made to Nicholas Pynnar in 1661 to 1662, and Garadice House was built sometime after that, possibly in the late seventeenth century, on the landward end of a peninsula that runs south into Garadice Lough. The house and its setting were laid out with some ambition: a sweeping entrance driveway, parkland to the north, and what appear to have been deliberately shaped landscape features. The circular enclosure sits about 230 metres due north of the house. Running through it is an embanked avenue on an east-north-east to west-south-west alignment, possibly added at a later date than the enclosure itself. Radiating outward from the enclosure, further broad avenues run on different diagonal lines to the south, west, north, and east, suggesting that the whole arrangement was conceived as a kind of formal geometry laid across the ground, the sort of designed parkland feature that became fashionable among Irish landowning families in the post-Restoration period.

The features are most clearly visible in aerial and satellite imagery rather than at ground level, where the earthworks have been reduced to low, grass-covered humps in ordinary-looking pasture. The broad banks and shallow fosses, the term for the ditches that typically flank such earthen boundaries, would be easy to miss on foot without knowing what to look for. The mature trees scattered across the area are likely survivors or descendants of deliberate planting, another layer of the original design still present in the landscape.

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