The discrepancy is part of the structure's charm in the older sense of the word, the kind of local nickname that outlasts the details it was meant to describe. The rock itself is called Carrigaknubber, and the tower was already marked simply as "Tower" on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which gives some sense of how matter-of-factly contemporaries accepted the presence of a miniature fortified structure on a hilltop in the Cork countryside.

The tower was built by Captain Cooke of Aghavrin House, sometime around the 1840s, as a belvedere, a purpose-built ornamental structure designed to command a view across a designed landscape. It is a slight thing by any practical measure: a square, three-storey tower just two metres by two metres in plan, with rectangular window openings framed by hood mouldings and an embattled parapet at the top. Hood mouldings are the projecting ridges above window openings that deflect rainwater, a feature borrowed from medieval ecclesiastical and defensive architecture and often used in nineteenth-century Gothic Revival building to lend an air of antiquity. A slim circular projection at the south-east corner rises above the main tower body and carries its own embattled parapet and slit windows, giving the whole structure the silhouette of something considerably more martial than a gentleman's viewing platform. At the base of Carrigaknubber Rock, separately, there is a mass rock, a flat or prominent stone that served as an outdoor altar during the Penal Laws, when Catholic worship was outlawed and priests conducted services in remote locations. The proximity of these two features, one a relic of suppression, the other a piece of aristocratic whimsy, is the kind of layering that Irish landscapes tend to accumulate quietly over time.

The tower is ruined and access has not been gained to the interior. It sits on private land associated with Aghavrin House, so any visit to the area would require appropriate permissions and some caution on the approach to the rock outcrop itself.