It stands noticeably taller than the structures around it, its stonework smothered in dense ivy that has, for decades, made close inspection of its most intriguing feature all but impossible: three pointed windows set together within a single window embrasure, appearing on both the north and south faces at second-floor level. The tower clearly predates the outbuilding range into which it has been absorbed, yet the masonry does not read as medieval. What it is, precisely, remains genuinely uncertain.

The Homan family acquired the Shurock estate in the second half of the 17th century, and the tower may belong to that period, possibly as part of a bawn, the walled enclosure that commonly protected an Irish country house of that era, before being superseded by the house itself in the 18th century. When the architectural historian Harold Leask visited in the mid-20th century, he recorded the tower as "portion of an old castle" sitting between two ranges of farm buildings, and described the windows as "a three light window of rough work and no cut stone." That description raises a further puzzle. The pointed windows could be medieval salvage, potentially taken from a nearby church at Labaun, now known as Mount Temple, which lies close by. It would not have been the only thing removed from Labaun to Shurock: an Early Christian cross-inscribed slab, a flat stone carved with a cross in the manner of the early Irish church, was at some point brought to the estate before eventually being returned to the graveyard at Labaun. Whether the windows followed a similar route, stripped from a ruined church and reused in a later structure, remains unresolved. The ivy that defeated Leask's examination has not retreated, and Shurock House itself is now a ruin, leaving the tower marooned in a slow accumulation of unanswered questions.