That makes the formal garden at Kilruddery, in County Wicklow, something of an anomaly: a largely intact layout from that earlier period, arranged on a grand scale to the south of the house.

The centrepiece of the design is a long double canal, two parallel water channels running side by side in the manner favoured by Dutch and French garden designers of the period. Alongside it are hedged alleys and a miniature amphitheatre formed from grass banks, the kind of outdoor theatrical space that would have been used for performance or simply for the pleasure of a shaped landscape. Writing in 1978, the architectural historian Mark Bence-Jones described the ensemble as one of the very few surviving formal garden layouts of this kind anywhere in Ireland, which puts it in rare company. Most comparable gardens were swept away during the eighteenth century when the naturalistic English landscape style came into vogue, making Kilruddery's survival more a matter of luck and continuity of ownership than any particular programme of preservation.

The garden sits immediately south of Kilruddery House itself, and the double canal is visible as a defining axis of the whole composition. The grass amphitheatre, which might easily be mistaken for a natural landform on first glance, repays a closer look: its careful terracing reveals a deliberate geometry that belongs entirely to the formal tradition it represents.