Designed landscape - tree-ring, Cashel, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Designed Landscapes
On a south-westerly slope above Lough Ree in County Longford, there is an earthwork that does not quite fit the usual categories.
It has no recognisable entrance, no clear defensive purpose, and no obvious medieval or prehistoric function. What it appears to be, in the careful phrasing of those who recorded it, is a piece of designed landscape, a ring of trees planted within a low enclosure, arranged to be seen and to shape a view rather than to shelter or to fortify.
The enclosure is roughly subcircular, reaching a maximum dimension of about 92 metres across. It is bounded by a low bank of earth and stone, around 2.2 metres wide and no more than half a metre tall, with an external fosse, a shallow ditch, running just outside it. These are modest earthworks, the kind that suggest a formal garden or estate feature rather than anything ancient or military. By 1837, when the first Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were being compiled, the site was already marked as a large, tree-covered enclosure, meaning the planting had been established well before that date. A second enclosure of similar size sits to the south-east, and the two together point toward a deliberate scheme, the kind of ornamental tree-ring planting that landowners across Ireland and Britain used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to punctuate their demesnes with visual incident, to catch the eye from a house or a path, and to give shapely silhouettes to otherwise open hillsides.
Today the monument is heavily overgrown with vegetation, which makes its internal character difficult to assess on the ground. The bank and fosse are still traceable, but the original planting scheme is long past any kind of formal maintenance. What remains is the outline of an idea, a circle drawn in earth and trees on a hillside facing out over one of Ireland's larger midland lakes, legible enough on an old map, and still faintly present in the landscape if you know to look for it.