Look more closely, though, and the structure begins to contradict itself. The upper three storeys are an 18th-century belvedere, a decorative tower built to give elevated views across a designed landscape, circular in plan with an internal diameter of just over three metres. But beneath it, partly buried into an east-facing slope, sits the ground floor of something older and quite different, a roughly circular space with a flattened north-east side, whose eastern wall juts out beyond the circumference of the later tower and once formed the northern side of a segmental-arched doorway. Photographs from 1994 showed a corresponding southern protrusion still in place; it has since been removed. Inside, a short flight of stone steps rises to a first-floor doorway in the south-west wall, which opens directly onto higher ground, a reminder that the older structure was built into the hillside rather than on top of it.

The tower's layered biography can be partially reconstructed. Gabriel Beranger, the Dutch-born artist who travelled Ireland recording antiquities between roughly 1750 and 1765, depicted the structure as part of a bridge, and showed it already in a ruinous condition. That places the earliest phases of construction before the mid-18th century. The later belvedere tower, which once carried a conical roof topped by a louvred cap, is visible in a late 18th-century print, suggesting it was added or substantially rebuilt sometime after Beranger made his sketches. By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map of the area, the whole ensemble was recorded simply as 'Tower', with no distinction drawn between the older substructure and the folly-like addition above it. The wooden stairs that once allowed visitors to climb through the three upper storeys are long gone, and the tower stands open to the sky, its roof and interior fittings stripped away, leaving only the stone shell of what was once a viewing platform in an ornamental demesne.