Designed landscape - tree-ring, Lauvlyer, Co. Mayo

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Designed Landscapes

Designed landscape – tree-ring, Lauvlyer, Co. Mayo

In the improved pasture of County Mayo, there is a circle that no longer exists.

It was once one of three small circular enclosures, each roughly fifteen to twenty metres across and fringed with trees, arranged in a close cluster on the grounds of Netley House. By the time the Ordnance Survey returned to map the area in 1922, the enclosures themselves had dissolved into the record, leaving only the trees standing in their rings. This one was later removed entirely during land reclamation, taking with it the last physical trace of whatever had stood there.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps show the area labelled Netley Park, part of the demesne, or formal estate grounds, surrounding Netley House. The three enclosures appear on that map as neat circles with tree-planting around their edges, spaced within roughly fifty metres of one another. When the same area was surveyed again in the early twentieth century, the enclosures were gone from the cartographic record and only tree clusters remained. The features were included in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 as possible enclosures, though the arrangement and the estate context point more convincingly toward deliberate landscape design. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was common practice on Irish demesnes to ornament parkland with carefully positioned plantings, sometimes circular or geometric in form, intended to give structure and visual interest to open ground. These three features, clustered together on the former pleasure grounds of Netley House, fit comfortably within that tradition.

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Pete F
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