Designed landscape features of this kind were typically created by landowners, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as deliberate interventions in the grounds surrounding a house or estate. They might take the form of ornamental mounds, artificial lakes, ha-has (sunken boundary walls that preserved views without visible fencing), or planted screens, all arranged to create a particular impression of the land rather than to farm or fortify it.

The townland name itself, Moat, may hint at earlier earthwork activity in the area, possibly a motte, which was a raised earthen mound used as the foundation for a timber tower by Anglo-Norman settlers after the twelfth century invasion of Ireland. Whether the designed feature here relates to, or was deliberately positioned in relation to, such an earlier earthwork is the kind of question that tends to follow these sites. Estate designers of the Georgian and Victorian periods were not above incorporating ancient mounds or ruins into their landscape compositions, lending an air of antiquity and romantic drama to what was otherwise managed parkland.