Unlike the ruins of a tower house or the earthworks of a rath, a designed landscape feature leaves a gentler mark: an ornamental arrangement of land, water, or planting that was shaped to be looked at, walked through, or contemplated, usually by the inhabitants of a nearby country house.

Designed landscapes of this kind became fashionable among the Irish landowning classes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often reflecting the influence of English picturesque ideals. Demesnes across Connacht were laid out with artificial lakes, walled gardens, specimen trees, and carefully positioned eye-catchers, all intended to give the impression of nature improved by taste rather than brute labour, though considerable brute labour was precisely what made them possible. Newtowneyre itself sits in a part of east Galway that saw significant estate development during this period, though the particular history of this feature, its date, the family responsible, and the form it originally took, remains unclear from what survives.