The reality at Creagh, near Skibbereen in West Cork, is more ambiguous. The tower is octagonal in plan, its walls nearly a metre thick, and it is pierced by pointed doors and windows that give it a vaguely Gothic air. A belvedere, in the vocabulary of designed landscapes, is a structure built primarily for the view it commands rather than for any working purpose. Yet the landowner's account of this one complicates that reading considerably.

According to local tradition, the tower was not built as a folly or a viewing platform at all, but as a mill, erected by the Beecher family, who were associated with the Creagh estate. The detail is an odd one. Mills were working buildings, and an octagonal tower with Gothic-pointed openings, positioned decoratively between a pleasure lake and a tidal estuary, seems an unlikely candidate for industrial use. It is possible the structure served a dual purpose, or that its ornamental qualities were layered onto a functional core, as occasionally happened when estate owners chose to make a virtue of a practical necessity. Each internal face of the octagon measures just 1.65 metres, which gives a sense of how compact the interior would have been at any given floor level, the walls consuming almost as much space as they enclose. Whatever its original use, the tower now survives as a ruin within the demesne of Creagh House, caught between the quiet of an artificial lake and the broader reach of the Ilen.