Designed landscape - tree-ring, Turoe, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Designed Landscapes
In a field of ordinary pastureland in County Galway, there is a feature that no longer exists in any physical sense, yet was carefully recorded on a map less than a century ago.
The 1933 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a circular tree-planted enclosure roughly twenty-three metres in diameter, sitting within what was then the Turoe demesne. Today, nothing of it remains above ground.
What the map captured was almost certainly a tree-ring, a deliberate ornamental planting of trees in a circular arrangement, a form of designed landscape feature associated with demesne improvement and estate aesthetics that became fashionable among landowning families in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Turoe demesne is perhaps best known as the location of the Turoe Stone, an elaborately carved Iron Age granite boulder, but this modest circular planting belonged to an entirely different chapter of the land's history, one concerned with horticultural fashion rather than prehistory. The cartographic record suggests it had already disappeared, or was disappearing, by the time the map was revised in the early twentieth century, leaving only its outline in ink as evidence it ever stood there.