It has a fireplace in one corner, four tall stone-arched openings in its walls, and circular oculi set into two of its faces, yet it measures barely three and a quarter metres on each side. It is a belvedere, a garden folly built for the pleasure of the view rather than for shelter, and it gestures, in its theatrical way, towards grief as much as towards the landscape below.

The structure dates from the mid to late nineteenth century and was raised, according to local tradition, to commemorate the death of a member of the Colthurst family at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The Colthursts were a prominent Anglo-Irish family in County Cork, and Clonmoyle House, visible to the north from the tower's parapet, sits within the same designed estate landscape. The choice of a belvedere as a memorial is not unusual for the period; wealthy families sometimes folded their mourning into the geometry of their grounds, creating a place to stand and look rather than a conventional tomb or inscription. The arched openings in each wall, their keystones now collapsed, would once have framed those views deliberately, while the parapet, coped with oversailing stones that project outward to throw off rainwater, was built to last longer than it perhaps has. The whole thing sits on an earthen mound, which amplifies the elevation and makes plain that the sightlines were designed, not accidental.