Buttevant derives from the French butte avant, meaning a forward projection, and the name itself signals that this was no ordinary mural tower, that is, a tower built into or along a city wall. It pushed outward, away from the wall line, facing the river directly, in a position that the Historic Atlas of Dublin City suggests may have overlooked a Hiberno-Norse quayside, a landing and trading area that predated the Anglo-Norman city walls entirely.

The tower's documented history stretches back to around 1260, when the Dublin White Book recorded a grant of the structure to William Picot, Clerk of the City. The terms were specific and pleasingly odd: Picot was to hold the tower and the land around it, bounded by the street running from Isolde's Tower towards the church of St Olave and extending to the new wall, on condition that he pay the Mayor one pair of gilt spurs each Easter Day. The tower continued to be leased out in subsequent centuries. In 1563, a bellman named John Money was granted use of it on the condition that he roof it with oak, slates, or boards, and keep the adjoining lane clean. By 1574, a Robert Byce held a sixty-one-year lease covering Buttevant's Tower, the tower over Dames Gate, and the bulwark between them, at a yearly rent of six shillings and eightpence Irish. A survey carried out in 1585 recorded it in some detail: a square, ruinous tower with a single vault, its walls about four feet thick and thirty feet high from the channel, measuring twelve feet square internally. Even then, after three centuries of use, it was already being described as old and deteriorating. The tower was demolished in 1675 when Essex Gate was constructed on or near the site.

There is nothing to see at ground level today. The 1892 Ordnance Survey map of Dublin City annotated the location simply as the site of Izod's Tower, with the note that no surface remains were visible, and that remains the case. A marker plaque was installed in 2002, and a portion of the north wall was uncovered during archaeological excavation, recorded at a height of 9.37 metres internally. The plaque is the only physical acknowledgement that anything stood here at all, which makes it worth seeking out for anyone interested in the layered, largely invisible archaeology of the old city margins near the river.