Follies occupy a peculiar category in Irish estate history: ornamental buildings, often ruined in appearance by deliberate design, constructed by landed families during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to lend their grounds a suitably romantic or classical atmosphere. They served no practical purpose, which was precisely the point.

The Belmont folly sits within what was once a designed landscape, the term used to describe the deliberate reshaping of an estate's grounds, typically including formal gardens, ornamental water features, tree plantings, and eye-catching structures placed at carefully chosen intervals to create views and vistas. Such landscapes were fashionable among the Anglo-Irish gentry from the mid-eighteenth century onward, reflecting broader European trends in landscape design. Without more detailed records surviving for this particular site, the precise date of the folly's construction and the family responsible for commissioning it remain unclear.