Follies occupy a particular place in the Irish landscape, most often the product of eighteenth or nineteenth century landed estates whose owners took pleasure in ornamenting their grounds with towers, grottos, sham ruins, or mock-classical fragments. The category of designed landscape folly implies something conceived as part of a broader ornamental scheme, a composed view rather than a solitary eccentricity.

Beyond its location in Oltore, Co. Galway, the specific history of this structure, its builder, date, form, and the estate to which it once belonged, remains to be fully documented. What can be said is that follies of this kind were rarely accidental. They required both means and imagination, and their survival into the present, however fragmentary, is itself a small argument against the erasure of the more decorative ambitions of the past.