Follies, by their nature, are architecture freed from the obligation of usefulness; they were built across eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish estates to punctuate a view, to suggest a romantic ruin, or simply to give a landlord something to admire from his drawing-room window. The one at Ballygarraun belongs to that tradition of designed landscapes in which the grounds of a house were arranged almost like a painting, with eye-catchers placed at calculated distances to draw the gaze outward.

Beyond its classification as a folly within a designed landscape, the historical record for this particular structure is sparse. The townland of Ballygarraun sits in County Galway, a county whose estate landscapes were shaped heavily by the Ascendancy period, when landlords with means and a taste for the fashionable transformed their demesnes according to ideas filtering in from English and continental garden design. Follies in this context could take many forms, from mock castles and sham towers to ornamental bridges and artificial grottos, each one a deliberate contrivance dressed up as something accidental or ancient.