These features, which could range from ornamental lakes and ha-has to walled gardens and carefully planted avenue trees, were meant to signal taste, wealth, and an improving sensibility, transforming working land into something that gestured towards an idealised nature.

The designed landscape tradition in Ireland flourished primarily from the eighteenth century onwards, as landowners drew on English and Continental fashions in garden and parkland design. In Connacht, as elsewhere, such interventions were closely tied to the ascendancy estates that once defined the region's social geography, many of which have since been demolished, subdivided, or absorbed back into the farmland around them. What survives is often fragmentary: a tree line here, an earthwork there, the ghost of an avenue visible only from above.