Until a storm around 1985 brought it down, the tower stood at about six metres, built of random-rubble limestone with a large first-floor window and a projecting stone cornice at the top. It was, by all accounts, three storeys over a basement, with its door facing east, looking out over the valley. It formed part of the designed landscape attached to Rockvale House, a mid-nineteenth-century residence immediately to the east, and was the kind of ornamental structure that Georgian and Victorian estate owners placed within sight of their houses to give the grounds a sense of drama or antiquity.

What the tower actually was, and what it was used for, is not entirely settled. James Grove White, writing between 1905 and 1925, identified it as a columbarium, which is a dovecote, a tower fitted with internal nesting boxes where pigeons were kept both as a food source and as a mark of landed status. A photograph from 1906 reproduced in his work shows the tower already unroofed, its lintelled ground-floor door still intact. The present owner of Rockvale House, however, has no recollection of any nesting boxes inside, which leaves the question open. The tower may have been purely a belvedere, a viewing structure designed to frame the landscape and be seen within it rather than to serve any agricultural purpose. About 400 metres to the south, the remains of a stone-built tea house add further weight to the idea that this was once a carefully arranged pleasure ground, where a family might walk, take refreshment, and look out across the Awbeg valley from several vantage points. The earlier house that Rockvale replaced also survives in part, its walls absorbed into the western side of the present building.