Designed landscape - tree-ring, Drumsillagh, Co. Leitrim

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Designed Landscapes

Designed landscape – tree-ring, Drumsillagh, Co. Leitrim

On a hillside in County Leitrim, close to the summit of a northeast-facing slope, a ring of mature trees marks something that is neither a fairy fort nor an ancient monument, but a deliberate piece of landscape design.

These tree-rings, sometimes called ring plantations, were a feature of eighteenth and nineteenth-century estate culture in Ireland, planted by landowners to ornament their grounds, mark a high point on the horizon, or simply signal the extent of their influence across the countryside. This one sits in quiet conversation with Drumsallagh House, visible roughly 300 metres to the southeast.

The ring appears on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1835 and 1907, recorded on the six-inch sheets as a small circular wooded area bisected by a northeast-southwest farm lane, which suggests the planting predates the mid-nineteenth century and survived into the early twentieth largely intact. What remains on the ground today is a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank two to three metres wide and an outer fosse, also two to three metres wide. A fosse in this context is simply a shallow ditch or drain running around the perimeter, probably serving both to protect young trees from grazing animals and to mark the boundary of the designed feature. The mature trees that remain are concentrated on the southwest side of a dividing field bank that now cuts through the enclosure, suggesting the ring has been partially absorbed into the working agricultural landscape over the past century.

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