Designed landscape - tree-ring, Castle Ffrench, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Designed Landscapes
On a north-facing slope in County Galway, a low earthwork traces the ghost of a tree-ring, a planted enclosure that was once a deliberate ornament in a landed estate's designed landscape.
Such features were common in the demesnes of the Anglo-Irish gentry, where trees were arranged in formal shapes, circles, ovals, or more elaborate outlines, partly for visual effect and partly as windbreaks or boundary markers. This particular example, associated with the former demesne of Castle Ffrench House, survives only as a barely legible oval scarp, roughly 60 metres by 40 metres, rising to just 0.7 metres at its highest point, the ground around it long since turned by the plough.
What makes the site quietly interesting is the discrepancy between its two appearances on Ordnance Survey mapping. On the first edition of the six-inch OS map, the enclosure is recorded as kidney-shaped and tree-planted. By the time the third edition was produced in 1932, the same feature is shown as a simpler oval, still planted. Whether the shape genuinely changed over that interval, or whether earlier surveyors interpreted the planting differently, is not clear. Either way, the progression from a distinctive kidney form to a regularised oval, and then to a ploughed-out earthwork scarcely visible above ground, charts a fairly typical trajectory for ornamental landscape features that outlasted the estates they were designed for.