When the antiquarian John O'Donovan visited around 1840, he recorded a rectangular structure barely thirteen feet square and twenty feet high, which is more the size of a garden ornament than any serious fortification. The tower still stands, and the working assumption is that it was built as a folly, one of those deliberately quaint or antique-looking structures that eighteenth-century landowners occasionally scattered across their grounds for aesthetic effect, rather than as a genuine defensive or residential building.

The backstory involves at least two distinct phases of occupation on the land, and possibly a third. A Civil Survey conducted between 1654 and 1656 recorded a ruined stone house in Balinemony, most likely within the present Castletalbot townland, along with 248 acres in Killila parish. Both had been owned in 1641 by Francis Talbot, described as a Protestant. That earlier house has never been reliably located, and it is just possible the folly tower was raised on or near its foundations. What seems more certain is that the tower belongs to the orbit of Castle Talbot House, a mid-eighteenth-century mansion sitting roughly 250 metres to the north-east. The tower itself is precisely detailed in its construction: a round-headed entrance in the south wall opens onto a room with large windows on three sides and a brick fireplace tucked into the north-west angle. The upper floors were reached first by an external staircase of granite blocks and then by an internal wooden stair, and the whole thing was finished at the top with stepped crenelations, the notched parapet associated with castle architecture, here applied to something that was never really a castle at all.