It is formally classified as a belvedere, a term for a structure built purely to command a pleasant view or to serve as an ornamental retreat within a designed landscape, yet the people who own the land simply call it the tea house. That gap between the official record and the domestic nickname tells you something about how these little buildings outlast their original purposes.

The structure stands two storeys, with a rectangular doorway cut into the south-west elevation, flanked by a smaller rectangular opening. The first floor carries window opes on its elevations, and the whole thing is capped by a pyramidal hipped roof with a finial at its centre. It sits to the south-east of Castle Lishen, the fortified house it once served as a landscape feature, and its attachment to a farm building suggests that practicality has long since absorbed whatever genteel leisure the tower was originally designed to offer. Belvederes of this kind were a fashionable addition to eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Irish estates, where landowners shaped their grounds to include eye-catchers, follies, and retreats intended for picnics, views, and afternoon entertainments. The tea house name carries that social history forward, even if the original guests are long gone.

The tower is a modest structure by any measure, but its survival intact, roof finial and all, makes it a quietly interesting survival of designed landscape thinking in a part of Cork where such features are not always easy to find.