Follies, as a category, occupy a peculiar corner of Irish estate history. They were ornamental structures, sometimes towers, arches, sham ruins, or grottoes, built primarily for visual effect rather than practical use, often commissioned by landed families in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries to lend drama or melancholy to a carefully arranged view. That one existed here, on the Atlantic-facing edge of Connaught, is noted, but little else survives to describe it.

Without further documentation, the folly at Bunowen More remains something of a cipher. The landscape around it, shaped by whoever commissioned the design, would have reflected the broader fashion among the Anglo-Irish gentry for picturesque estate grounds, a movement that drew on landscape painting and sought to make nature itself look composed. Whether anything of that arrangement survives today is unclear. The record of its existence is itself a kind of ruin, a name and a category without the story that should accompany them.