Follies, as a rule, were built not to serve any practical function but to ornament a view, invoke a mood, or signal the cultivated taste of an estate owner. They might take the form of fake ruins, gothic towers, hermitages, or miniature classical temples, and their presence in the Irish countryside is often the only visible trace of a landscaping programme that once shaped entire demesnes.

Woodlawn, in the east of County Galway, was an estate of some consequence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, associated with the Trench family, who held the title of Baron Ashtown. The designed landscape of which this folly forms a part reflects the broader fashion among the Anglo-Irish gentry for remodelling their surroundings in ways that echoed the English landscape movement, with its preference for naturalistic parkland punctuated by eye-catching structures. The folly at Woodlawn fits into that tradition, though the sparse record that survives tells us little about its precise form, date of construction, or which member of the family commissioned it.