The place has been defined, in other words, by two successive absences. The original settlement here belonged to the church of St Benignus, which gave the townland its early name, Kilbinane. No trace of that church survives. What replaced it, at least in name, was a mausoleum erected in 1690 by William Fitzmaurice, the 20th Lord Kerry, and it is that monument, long since demolished, that the townland is now named after.

Fitzmaurice built the structure on the summit of the same round hill that the old church had occupied. It was a substantial piece of funerary architecture: a circular tower twelve metres high and thirty metres in circumference, with walls a metre thick and four semi-circular windows set into them. A protective outer wall rose to 3.5 metres. Beneath the tower floor lay the tomb itself, roughly 4.5 metres in diameter with a flat stone roof that doubled as the tower's foundation level. William died in 1697 and was buried here, as, according to tradition, were his father and son before him. The coffin was made of lead, which proved to be a misfortune. During the Land War of the 1880s, agrarian militants known as Moonlighters, who conducted night raids against landlords and their agents, broke into the tomb and stripped the lead coffin for use in making ammunition. The tower survived that desecration, only to meet a more mundane end: in 1962 the County Council demolished it for use as quarry material. Today, nothing is visible on the surface.