Designed landscape - tree-ring, Drumdoney, Co. Sligo

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Designed Landscapes

Designed landscape – tree-ring, Drumdoney, Co. Sligo

On the south-facing slope of a drumlin in County Sligo, three small earthen circles sit quietly in pastureland, easy to mistake for the remnants of something ancient and mysterious.

They are not. Classified as tree-rings, these features are almost certainly estate ornaments, deliberate arrangements made on the demesne of Drumdoney, probably after 1700, when the landscaping of private grounds became a fashionable expression of taste and means among the Irish landowning class.

A tree-ring, in this context, is essentially a circular earthen enclosure built to contain and display a single tree or a tight cluster of planting, giving it a formal, sculptural presence within a designed landscape. This particular example measures roughly eight metres across internally, enclosed by an earthen bank about one and a half metres wide and rising to a metre on the outside, with a shallow external fosse, or ditch, running around its perimeter. It is one of a group of three such rings on the Drumdoney demesne, all of them absent from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, which suggests either that they were constructed after that survey was completed or that the mapmakers simply did not consider them worth recording. Either way, their omission from one of the most thorough cartographic exercises of nineteenth-century Ireland adds a small puzzle to what is otherwise a fairly legible post-medieval feature. The group was not picked up in the Sites and Monuments Record of 1989 but was formally listed by 1995, nudging these modest earthworks into the official register of the country's recorded heritage.

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