It was never a fortification or a functional building in any practical sense. It is a belvedere, a folly-type structure built purely to be looked at, or looked from, as part of a designed landscape. The fashion for such ornamental towers reached its height among the Anglo-Irish gentry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners arranged their grounds to frame views, reward a walk, and signal a certain cultivated taste. This one has long since lost its roof and much of its purpose, but its fabric survives in reasonable detail.

The tower is roughly five metres square in plan, and its ground floor is largely solid, which is characteristic of a structure designed to carry a viewing platform rather than to accommodate everyday use. A door in the south wall opens into a lintelled passage, a short corridor roofed with flat horizontal stones, that cuts through the east side and connects to a staircase built into the north wall. That stair rises to a first-floor chamber, where wide window openings remain visible in the walls. Those openings would once have framed the views the whole structure was designed to present, presumably back towards the house and across the surrounding demesne. A second door in the north wall, positioned between ground and first-floor level, also gives access to the stairway, suggesting the interior arrangement was carefully considered even in a building whose main purpose was aesthetic.