Such features, typically created as part of formal demesne landscaping in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, were intended less as practical elements than as visual punctuation, shaping the way an estate was experienced and perceived from particular viewpoints.

Without further detail in the available record, the feature's precise origins and attribution remain unclear. What can be said is that Portumna itself has a substantial history of designed landscape activity, centred on Portumna Castle and its grounds. The castle, a semi-fortified house built for the Burke family in the early seventeenth century, was surrounded by one of the earliest formal gardens in Ireland, laid out in a geometric style consistent with continental European fashions of the period. Later centuries brought the softer, more naturalistic aesthetic associated with English landscape design, and it is within this broader tradition of deliberate shaping and ornamentation that the feature most likely belongs.