It is not a defensive structure in any meaningful sense, nor a medieval remnant. It is a belvedere, a deliberately constructed ornamental tower built as part of a designed landscape, intended to frame a view rather than guard one. What makes it quietly strange is the combination of picturesque decay and evident practicality: the pointed doorway in the north-east wall, flanked by narrow splayed windows, and the pointed windows at first-floor level, give it the Gothic Revival styling fashionable in Anglo-Irish demesne design, while a wall inserted at first-floor level to the south-west contains six tiers of nesting boxes, suggesting the tower did useful work for pigeons or doves even as it served an aesthetic purpose.

A belvedere of this kind was a common feature of the grander Irish estate landscape from the eighteenth century onward, a structure positioned to command or compose a particular view across the grounds. Here, that view included a bridge, which remains visible from the tower. The New Court demesne also contained at least three other towers, which is an unusually generous concentration of such structures within a single designed landscape, implying an ambitious and theatrical approach to the arrangement of the grounds. The tower itself is modest in scale, with an internal diameter of just 2.7 metres and walls 0.7 metres thick, more gesture than monument, but no less deliberate for that.