Follies were built not to shelter or defend or worship, but to ornament, to evoke, and sometimes simply to give a wealthy landowner something interesting to look at from the drawing-room window. That one exists here, within a designed landscape, places Roscam within a wider eighteenth or nineteenth-century tradition of Irish estate improvement, in which demesnes were shaped, planted, and furnished with decorative structures intended to suggest antiquity, romance, or classical learning.