That such a feature is noted here at all suggests someone, at some point, went to considerable trouble to impose an aesthetic order on this particular stretch of the Galway countryside.

The broader tradition of designed landscapes in Ireland is largely a product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners, many of them Anglo-Irish gentry, remodelled their demesnes in line with fashions imported from Britain and the Continent. Formal geometric layouts gave way, over time, to the naturalistic style associated with English landscape gardening, in which parkland was arranged to look uncontrived while being anything but. Features were positioned to reward the eye from specific vantage points, ha-has were dug to keep livestock out of view without interrupting the sightline, and specimen trees were planted with the understanding that their full effect would only be felt by later generations.