Follies were a fixture of the designed landscape movement that swept Irish and British estates from the eighteenth century onward, when landowners commissioned ruins, towers, hermitages, and Gothic arches to give their parklands a sense of romantic age and melancholy. Dunmore's example belongs to this tradition, a landscape feature intended to be looked at rather than used.

Beyond the basic classification of the structure as a folly within a designed demesne landscape, the surviving record offers little by way of specific names, dates, or builders. What can be said is that demesne landscapes of this kind were typically the project of a single improving landlord, shaped over decades and reflecting fashions in garden design that moved from formal geometric layouts toward the more naturalistic aesthetic championed by designers such as Capability Brown and his Irish counterparts. A folly within such a scheme was rarely an afterthought; it was usually a considered focal point, placed to close a vista or animate a walk through the grounds.