Such features could include ornamental lakes, walled gardens, ha-has, tree avenues, or earthwork terracing, elements introduced not for agriculture or defence but purely to organise the view and signal the taste and means of whoever commissioned them.

The Rahasane estate was historically associated with the Burke family and later other landowners typical of the Protestant Ascendancy in Connacht. The wider landscape around Rahasane is also notable for Rahasane Turlough, one of the largest turloughs in Ireland, a seasonal lake that fills and drains through the limestone beneath it, leaving a wetland that shifts dramatically with the time of year. Any designed landscape in this setting would have had to reckon with that unpredictability, working around ground that is dry in summer and flooded in winter, which makes the presence of deliberate ornamental landscaping here a quietly interesting proposition.