It is a belvedere, a structure raised not for defence or industry but for the pleasure of a view, and this particular example is compact enough to seem almost miniature against the open sky of the Mizen Peninsula.

Built in the late nineteenth century, the tower measures just 2.6 metres on each side, with walls 0.6 metres thick and a height of around nine metres, enough to lift a person clear above the immediate rock and scrub. Three storeys are fitted into that narrow frame. Entry was through a first-floor door in the north wall, reached by a stone staircase, an arrangement that kept the ground level clean and gave the whole thing a faint air of ceremony. Hood mouldings, the small projecting drip-stones above window openings that channel rainwater away from the frame below, survive over the second-floor windows on the east and south walls. The parapet at the top is embattled, meaning it carries the alternating raised and lowered sections associated with castle battlements, a decorative flourish common to the romantically-inflected estate architecture of the Victorian period. The south-facing windows would have framed Crookhaven directly, which was almost certainly the point. A second tower of similar design is visible to the south-west, suggesting this was part of a considered landscape arrangement rather than a solitary folly.