Twelve metres tall and topped with a second, slimmer turret, it was never a defensive structure in any meaningful sense, yet it was built to look exactly like one. The embattled parapet, its crenellations carried on corbels projecting from the stonework, and the pointed door opening at ground level on the south-east side, with narrow pointed window openings above, all belong to a tradition of deliberate, theatrical Gothic. This is a belvedere, an ornamental tower built not to repel anyone but to be seen, and to see from.

Belvederes of this kind were a feature of designed landscapes attached to the houses of prosperous landowners in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ireland. They served aesthetic purposes, acting as eye-catchers in a composed view, but they could be practically useful too. At Belgrove, local tradition records that this particular tower was used as a lookout over the river and as a mount for a flag staff, which suggests it carried some social function alongside the purely decorative one. Flying a flag from a private estate tower was a way of announcing presence and status, a habit more common than it might now seem among the Anglo-Irish gentry. The stacked arrangement here, a primary tower with a thinner, independently embattled section rising from its top, would have given whoever climbed it a clear view across the surrounding landscape and waterway.