These elements, whether a walled garden, an ornamental pond, a ha-ha, or a carefully placed grove of trees, were the vocabulary of estate improvement in Ireland from the seventeenth century onwards, and they often outlast the houses they were made to serve.

The designed landscape as a form reflects the broader influence of English and continental fashions on the Irish landowning classes, particularly from the Georgian period. Landowners remodelled their surroundings to signal taste and prosperity, sometimes employing professional designers, more often working from pattern books or the example of neighbouring estates. In Connacht, where the land itself could be boggy and resistant, such interventions often required considerable effort and resources to impose any formal order on the terrain.