Bowling green, Egmont, Co. Cork

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Estate Features

Bowling green, Egmont, Co. Cork

In a field of level pasture in north Cork, between a country house and a barn, there is a rectangle of grass that was once a bowling green.

It measures roughly 35 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, and it was enclosed by a fosse, a water-filled boundary ditch, giving the whole feature a kind of formal, self-contained geometry. Nothing of it is visible today at ground level; the surface has been levelled entirely. The only way to see it now is from the air, where it shows up as a rectangular cropmark, a faint geometric scar left in the vegetation by the buried outline of the old ditch.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the feature as a hachured rectangular enclosure, suggesting it was already a landscape curiosity by the time the early surveyors passed through. A local historian, Grove White, noted it between 1905 and 1925 as a bowling green with a surrounding ditch that had once held water. Lawn bowling of this kind was a common pursuit among the Anglo-Irish gentry from the seventeenth century onwards, and formal bowling greens were occasionally incorporated into the designed grounds of country houses. The association with Egmont House places this one firmly in that tradition, a piece of organised leisure laid out in the demesne landscape and later absorbed back into ordinary farmland as fashions and fortunes changed.

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Pete F
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