Designed landscape features of this kind, sometimes called pleasure grounds or ornamental demesnes, were a deliberate reshaping of the natural terrain carried out by estate owners, typically from the seventeenth century onwards, to project wealth, taste, and a particular idea of order onto the Irish countryside. They could include anything from artificial lakes and planted woodlands to ha-has, the concealed ditches that kept livestock out of a formal garden without interrupting the view with a fence, and carefully positioned eye-catchers such as follies or ornamental bridges.

Belmont itself sits within a broader tradition of landed estate improvement that was common across Connacht during the Georgian and Victorian periods, when improving landlords invested in their demesnes as both a practical and an aesthetic enterprise. The shaping of land on this scale required considerable resources and often the labour of many local people, particularly during periods of estate expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What remains of such designed landscapes today is frequently fragmentary, the bones of a grander scheme, readable in the lie of the land, the curve of an old avenue, or the survival of specimen trees planted long ago to frame a view that no longer exists in the way its designer intended.