These structures, whose name derives from the Italian for "beautiful view", were built into designed landscapes as elevated platforms or ornamental towers, their purpose purely aesthetic, a place to stand and see. The fact that one was thought worth constructing at Ballyedmond tells us something about how the grounds there were conceived, even if the details of that conception have grown quiet.

The designed landscape at Ballyedmond represents a category of heritage that can be easy to overlook. Unlike a castle or a church, a designed landscape leaves softer evidence: graded terraces, specimen trees grown large and strange, a path that curves for reasons no longer obvious. A belvedere within such a setting would have been the focal point of that visual thinking, the spot from which the whole composition was meant to be read. Without further documentation to draw from, the precise history of who built it, and when, remains unrecorded here.