Designed landscape features, a category that encompasses ornamental plantings, walled enclosures, ha-has, and artificially managed water features, were the standard vocabulary of improving landlords in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a way of signalling cultivation and aesthetic intent against a backdrop of bog and rock.

Clifden Castle was built by John D'Arcy, founder of the town of Clifden, in the early nineteenth century. The D'Arcy family shaped the wider landscape of the estate in keeping with the conventions of the period, imposing order on a terrain that offered little naturally in the way of sheltered ground or mature woodland. The demesne walk that threads through the estate is still followable today, passing through what remains of that planted and managed landscape.