That label raises an obvious question, and researchers have not been able to answer it. The building's function is unknown, its form is uncertain, and it has since vanished from the ground entirely, leaving behind nothing but a name on an old map.

A mural tower, the kind of projecting tower built into a town wall to allow defenders to fire along its length, would be the most obvious candidate for something called a turret. But Macroom does not appear in the standard scholarly record of Irish walled towns, which makes that interpretation unlikely. Whatever this structure was, whether decorative, functional, or something in between, the cartographers of 1842 apparently thought it distinctive enough to label and record. By 1995, when researchers working on the archaeological inventory of County Cork examined the site, it was no longer visible at ground level. No account of when it disappeared, or how, appears to have survived.