On your strolls through Bamboo Park you will discover 13 stone pillars. They have an unknown origin. They are suspected to be ancient, although their date is unknown, and their religious significance is only speculative. Maybe one day someone will be able to tell ?

But the actual age of big parts of the Bamboo Park is much older, its history began with the Old Garden, now open to the public and adjacent to the Bamboo Park.
Writing in 1910, Wyndham Fitzherbert noted that Lady Ardilaun had established a garden at Glengarriff on a "delightful spot sloping down to the water". Some years earlier, Fitzherbert reported, a house had been planned to accompany the garden, but this had never been carried out and the place had become "somewhat of a wilderness". It was however, "most beautiful" and could easily be transformed into "a charming garden". Fitzherbert mentioned rare rhododendrons, both species and varieties, and the largest Crinodendron hookerianum he had ever seen, twenty feet high, twelve feet through and covered in July with seed pods from its highest shoots to the base.
The garden described by Fitzherbert was located in the townland of Reenmeen East on lands subsequently bequeathed by Lady Ardilaun to her godson, Captain Simmy White, and sold by him for housing development. It seems probable that elements of Lady Ardilaun's garden survived and prospered in the still outstandingly beautiful gardens of Monks Harbour.(in Nigel Everett, Wild Gardens, The Lost Desmenes of Bantry Bay).