It is a belvedere, a structure built purely for the pleasure of the view, and it was designed to be inhabited, however temporarily. That combination of the ornamental and the functional gives it an odd, slightly ambiguous character that sets it apart from more obviously practical buildings in the West Cork landscape.

The tower dates to the nineteenth century and rises to three storeys, compact but solid, with walls roughly three quarters of a metre thick. The ground floor entrance is a pointed arch set into the north wall, a Gothic flourish that signals this was built for aesthetic effect as much as utility. The north and west elevations each carry large central windows, around 1.35 metres wide, flanked by much narrower openings of only about 0.2 metres across, an arrangement that frames particular views while keeping out the Atlantic weather. Inside, the east wall contains chimney flues and fireplaces, so whoever used this place expected to spend enough time here to need a fire. The parapet at the top is embattled, meaning it has the alternating raised and lowered sections associated with castle battlements, another piece of romantic period styling that places the building firmly in the tradition of estate landscape design popular among landowning families of the era.

The Sheep's Head is a narrow finger of land between Bantry Bay to the north and Dunmanus Bay to the south, and from an elevated position here the water is visible on both sides. A belvedere sited to exploit that geography would have served as a kind of observation platform for an estate, somewhere to look out over land and sea in conditions that made the main house feel too enclosed. The tower at Dromnea is a quiet example of how nineteenth-century landowners shaped the Irish countryside not only through agriculture and architecture but through deliberate acts of framing the view.