It is a folly, that peculiarly eighteenth and nineteenth-century fashion among landed gentry for constructing ornamental buildings with no practical purpose, designed instead to improve a view, suggest antiquity, or simply demonstrate that the owner had the money and the whimsy to build something entirely unnecessary. What makes this one quietly curious is the contradiction at its core: someone went to the considerable trouble of constructing a fireplace and flue inside a building that was, in all probability, never meant to be lived in.

The tower was recorded on the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map of 1897, where it is annotated simply as "Tower" and shown as a circular structure. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland examined it in 2008, they found a roofless rubble-stone building whose ground floor retains a base batter, a slight outward slope at the foot of the wall that lends structural stability and gives the tower a faintly military silhouette. The door opening uses a segmental brick arch, and the same brick detailing carries through to the window openings on the upper floors. The walls are rendered both inside and out, and the brickwork at the top may once have formed crenellations, the battlemented parapet associated with castle architecture. Multiple window openings across three storeys, combined with the demesne setting, strongly suggest the building was conceived as a visual feature rather than a functional one, positioned to command views across a wide arc from north-northwest around through north and east to south, with Derk House itself sitting some 275 metres to the southwest.

The tower stands within a coppice dense enough to obscure it entirely from aerial imagery, so finding it on the ground requires some orientation. A tree-ring monument lies roughly 100 metres to the north-northeast, which may help as a secondary reference point when navigating the demesne. The beech canopy that hides the structure from satellites also means the interior can feel dim even on a clear day, so it is worth arriving with that in mind. Look for the rendered stonework of the exterior walls once you are close, and note the segmental arches above the door and windows, a small but deliberate decorative touch that suggests the builder had aesthetic intentions even for the details nobody was ever meant to use.