Avenue, Ballynamaunagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Designed Landscapes
In improved pasture on a south-facing slope in Ballynamaunagh, a low arc of earth curves gently across the ground, barely registering to a casual eye.
At its highest on the exterior it rises to just 0.7 metres, and along much of its length it is nearly flush with the surrounding field. Yet this unassuming bank, roughly 60 metres long, is what remains of a formal entrance avenue, the kind of carefully graded approach that once announced arrival at a substantial country house in a language every visitor would have understood.
The bank marks the former avenue leading to Mount Prospect House, a property that appears on all the historic Ordnance Survey mapping of the area. The earthwork runs on a broadly east-west axis, curving to the north-west at its western end, while the avenue itself ran north-south toward the house. The bank is around 6.6 metres wide overall, narrowing to about 2 metres at the top, and a level terrace survives on the slope to the north, uphill from the main feature. Together, the curvilinear bank and the terrace are thought to be remnants of the designed landscape that once surrounded Mount Prospect House, the kind of modest but deliberate shaping of ground that georgian and victorian estate owners used to organise their surroundings and frame views. The house itself is gone, or at least no longer standing in any meaningful way, and the land has long since been brought into agricultural use, which accounts for the levelled and reduced condition of what remains.
What survives, then, is a ghost of a designed space, legible only if you know to look for the slight swell of earth and the geometry of its curve. The terrace to the north would once have provided an elevated platform, possibly overlooking the approach, and the avenue below it would have given visitors a gradual, considered arrival. Now cows graze over it, and the whole ensemble is slowly being absorbed back into the pasture.