Locally it goes by the name "gazebo", which understates what it once was. The battered base on the north face, the broken springing of an arch on the west side, and a small projection with concave corners at the east end of the south wall are the remnants of something considerably more deliberate: a belvedere, that is, a purpose-built structure designed purely to frame a view, positioned here because the ridge offers a commanding prospect in every direction.

The writer Charles Smith, describing the area in 1750, recorded a round tower on this spot with a lantern room at its top, from which, he wrote, one could take in a prospect of the adjacent coast and islands. The structure was therefore already conceived as a viewing platform in the mid-eighteenth century, almost certainly connected to Aghadown House below, which it was approached from by a road climbing up the hill from the west. A belvedere of this kind was a fashionable element of designed landscapes around that period, when landowners arranged their grounds to include eye-catchers, prospect towers, and carefully staged views of the surrounding countryside and sea. By the time the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map was published in 1842, the tower was already marked as being in ruins, alongside the adjacent remains of Aghadown Castle. A century later, the 1944 edition recorded even the castle as merely a site, the landscape having continued to diminish around the stubborn platform that remains today.