The garden lying to the south of Kilruddery House in County Wicklow survived all of that, and remains one of the very few layouts of its kind still intact anywhere on the island. That alone makes it quietly extraordinary.

Formal gardens of this period followed principles imported largely from continental Europe, particularly France and the Netherlands, emphasising geometry, symmetry, and the subordination of nature to human design. At Kilruddery, those principles were applied on a grand scale. The layout includes a long double canal, where two parallel water channels run in close formation, a feature associated with Dutch influence that was fashionable among the Anglo-Irish gentry of the period. Elsewhere, clipped hedges line alleys designed to frame views and control movement through the space. Perhaps the most unusual survival is a miniature amphitheatre formed from grassed banks, a theatrical flourish of the kind that was occasionally attempted in ambitious garden schemes of the era but rarely survives in any form. Mark Bence-Jones, writing in 1978, described the whole composition as being on a grand scale, and his summary of it has not been seriously contested since.