It is not a medieval fortification or a remnant of some earlier defensive structure. It is a belvedere, a purpose-built ornamental tower of the kind that Georgian and Regency landowners placed within their designed landscapes, usually to serve as a focal point, a viewpoint, or simply a pleasing architectural accent visible from the main house.

The tower is unusually complete in its internal arrangement for what is, in essence, a decorative object. Measuring roughly two and a half metres square internally, it rises two storeys. The ground floor has a door in the west wall, a fireplace set into the south wall, and windows facing north and east. The upper floor, reached by a door in the south wall rather than an internal stair, has its own fireplace in the west wall and matching windows. That each floor was fitted with a fireplace suggests the building was genuinely usable, a place to sit out on a cold day or receive visitors in some minor theatrical way, rather than a purely visual conceit. The embattled parapet would have given it a vaguely medieval silhouette when seen from the house grounds, which was precisely the point; the Gothic Revival taste of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries encouraged landowners to scatter their estates with structures that implied antiquity without actually being ancient.