Neither is accurate. The structure is classified as a belvedere, a decorative tower or elevated lookout built not for any civic or policing function but as a designed landscape feature, intended to be seen from a country house and to lend the surrounding grounds a degree of architectural drama.

The tower dates to the mid nineteenth century and is rectangular in plan, with corbelled battlements projecting outward from the top of its three storeys and a two-bay, two-storey gabled projection at its north-eastern corner. The confusion with a police barracks is not entirely groundless: the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows an L-shaped range nearby that was indeed marked as a Police Barracks, and the belvedere sits just beyond it. The Colthurst family, who were responsible for building a country house to the south of the tower at roughly the same period, are thought to have constructed the tower as part of the same designed estate landscape. The two buildings, the tower and the house, did not survive the political upheavals of the early twentieth century. Both were burnt during the 1920s, and the house was subsequently demolished. The tower remained.