It is not a gravestone, not a boundary marker in any conventional sense, and not quite a tower. It is a belvedere, a decorative vertical feature built as part of a designed landscape, intended to be seen from a house rather than to be used for any practical purpose. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records it simply as a "pillar", which is accurate enough as far as it goes, but tells you nothing about why someone went to the considerable trouble of building it.

The structure itself is solid random-rubble limestone set on a slight plinth, with a square base measuring roughly 2.3 metres by 2.3 metres rising to about 3.5 metres before the body tapers gradually upward, divided into three tiers by horizontal string courses and finished with an octagonal pinnacle at the top. It sits approximately 150 metres south of Stannard's Grove, the house it was presumably built to complement, and a similar distance from the older Carrigdownane Castle nearby. The history of Stannard's Grove is itself a little tangled. A date plaque on the house credits William Stackpoole with building it in 1904, yet the piered entrance sweep to the west carries a roughly inscribed date of 1842, matching the belvedere's appearance on the Ordnance Survey map of the same year. Whatever the sequence of construction, the house was blown up in 1921 and subsequently rebuilt in 1924, a reminder that the landscape it sits in carries the marks of the revolutionary period as much as of the Victorian taste for ornamental grounds.