At Ballydrehid in County Tipperary, a roughly rectangular earthwork cut into a natural rise was shaped in the eighteenth century not for defence or agriculture, but purely for effect. The ground was sculpted so that a house would appear to sit higher than it actually did, its lawn elevated above the surrounding landscape by a scarp, the steep face left when earth is cut back or built up to create a level platform.

The earthwork sits immediately to the north-east of Ballydrehid House, at the point where the River Aherlow meets the River Suir just below. The feature was recorded on the second edition Ordnance Survey map, surveyed between 1901 and 1905, though it belongs to the same period as the house itself, which dates to the eighteenth century. The intention was straightforward: to take a hill that was already there and make it more so, giving the house a commanding position over the Suir valley and framing the view of the two rivers meeting below. It is the kind of earthmoving project that would once have required considerable labour and planning, yet its purpose was entirely aesthetic, a manipulation of topography in service of Georgian ideas about how a gentleman's residence should relate to its landscape.