It is a belvedere, a structure built primarily to be looked at, or looked from, as part of a designed landscape. The fashion for such follies and eye-catchers reached Ireland through the influence of English and continental landscape gardening traditions, typically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners shaped their grounds to produce carefully composed views and agreeable surprises for those walking the estate.

What survives at Raleigh is a two-storey embattled tower, the kind of deliberately castle-like structure whose battlements signal theatrical intent rather than any need for defence. It sits within the north-western side of a D-shaped raised platform, roughly four and a half metres high, which is enclosed by a parapet wall with a low turret projecting from the south-western corner. Stairs in the west wall give access to the platform, and a fireplace survives in the north-eastern corner of the tower interior, suggesting the space was at least occasionally used for shelter or sociable retreat. The interior measures only about 1.3 metres north to south, so this was never a generous room. The upper floor and roof are now gone, leaving the tower as a roofless shell, though the platform and parapet walls remain substantially intact.