Designed landscape - tree-ring, Currahchase, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Designed Landscapes
On a low knoll within the mixed woodland of Currahchase, County Limerick, there is a circular arrangement of trees that the Ordnance Survey cartographers of the nineteenth century recorded simply as a plantation, with no suggestion that anything more deliberate lay behind it.
Look more carefully at the OS 25-inch map, however, and what emerges is a suboval enclosure roughly 34 metres in diameter, with a subrectangular annexe, approximately 27 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, partially conjoined to its eastern side. The geometry is too considered to be accidental, and the combination of enclosure and annexe gives the whole feature a formal quality that sits somewhere between landscape ornament and something older, though the record is careful not to classify it as an antiquity.
The feature lies approximately 590 metres to the east-north-east of Currah Chase House, the principal seat of the de Vere family, whose most celebrated member was the Victorian poet Aubrey de Vere. Designed landscapes of this kind, sometimes called tree-rings or ring plantations, were a common element of demesne improvement in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland, where landowners shaped their grounds according to fashionable aesthetic principles, using plantations to frame views, mark high points, or simply impose a sense of order on the countryside. Whether this particular ring began as pure ornament or incorporated or imitated an earlier earthwork is a question the current record leaves open. What is clear is that by the time aerial photography became available, the woodland had closed in entirely around it, making the shape legible on a map far more easily than on the ground.
Currahchase is now a public forest park managed by Coillte, so access to the broader estate is straightforward, with marked trails running through the woodland. The knoll itself, however, sits within dense mixed woodland that had already obscured the feature on satellite imagery taken between 2011 and 2018, so a visitor should not expect a clear prospect of a neatly defined ring. The interest here is largely one of orientation and inference, reading the landscape against the old map rather than seeing it whole. Late autumn or winter, when the canopy has thinned, offers the best conditions for making out any ground-level traces of the enclosure edge or the slight rise of the knoll itself.
