Rectangular in plan and fitted with a pointed door on its north side, it was built not for defence or habitation but as a belvedere, a decorative tower or raised viewing structure designed to give the inhabitants of a country house a commanding outlook over their designed landscape. Such features were fashionable additions to Irish and British estates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ornamental as much as functional, and this one appears to have been positioned to the south-east of the main house with some deliberate attention to the view it would frame or command.

What makes the Cappagh example quietly interesting is what sits nearby. To the west of the tower are bee boles, small recessed niches built into a wall to shelter straw beehives, known as skeps, from wind and rain. Bee boles are relatively uncommon survivals in Ireland, and their presence here alongside a designed landscape feature suggests a working estate that took some care over both its aesthetics and its practical arrangements. The combination of a genteel viewing tower and a utilitarian wall of beehive niches gives the site an oddly layered character, part ornament, part kitchen economy, both now overtaken by vegetation.