Designed landscape feature, Cool, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Designed Landscapes
In a flat stretch of County Limerick pasture, a faint oval depression in the ground is almost all that remains of what was once, apparently, a deliberate act of landscaping.
No marker identifies it, no signage explains it, and the Ordnance Survey abandoned recording it after its earliest maps. What survives is a shallow hollow in the earth, roughly 70 metres along its longer axis and 45 metres across, with faint traces of a surrounding bank that only become legible when viewed from above.
The feature first appears on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch map, shown as a dotted oval with a trackway running along its eastern edge. Crucially, the cartographers did not mark it as an antiquity, which in nineteenth-century surveying practice would have indicated a recognised archaeological site such as a rath or enclosure. Instead, it was recorded as a functional or ornamental element of the landscape, and the most likely explanation is that it was associated with Cool House, which stands approximately 200 metres to the north. Designed landscape features of this kind were common additions to Irish country estates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners would shape the grounds around their houses with ornamental enclosures, ha-has, planted mounds, and similar contrivances intended to organise or beautify the view. After the 1840 map, the feature disappears from subsequent Ordnance Survey editions entirely, suggesting it had either been absorbed into surrounding farmland or simply ceased to be considered worth recording. Its outline was identified more recently by researcher Martin Fitzpatrick using a Google Earth orthoimage dated November 2018.
The site sits roughly 115 metres west of the stream marking the townland boundary with Carrickittle, in ground that remains agricultural pasture. There is no public installation or formal access point, and visiting would depend on permission from the landowner. For anyone with an interest in estate archaeology or the quieter legacies of the ascendancy period, the Google Earth imagery offers the clearest view of the surviving outline, where the depression and possible bank are most legible against the surrounding field surface.