Designed landscape - tree-ring, Mullalough, Co. Offaly

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Designed Landscapes

Designed landscape – tree-ring, Mullalough, Co. Offaly

In a field near Mullalough in County Offaly, there survives a feature that sits awkwardly between the natural and the deliberate.

It has the form of a tree-ring, the kind of circular arrangement of trees or earthworks sometimes planted as a designed ornamental feature in the grounds of a country house, yet it has been partially levelled, leaving something that is neither quite a landscape feature nor quite an earthwork, and not entirely either one thing or the other.

The feature is associated with Mount Briscoe House and was recorded in 1977. Tree-rings of this kind were a common enough affectation of the improving landlord tradition in Ireland, where the grounds of a substantial house might be dressed with plantations, walks, and ornamental earthworks to signal cultivation and aesthetic ambition. Whether the levelling here was deliberate, the result of agricultural clearance, or simply the slow work of time and neglect is not recorded. What remains is ambiguous enough to prompt the question, which is part of what makes it worth noting at all.

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