The ground floor is circular, built from random rubble with rectangular window openings and a door; but step up to the first floor and the plan shifts to a heptagon, seven-sided, with small rectangular lights set into the walls. It is the kind of architectural oddity that suggests a builder working more from whim than from any orthodox pattern book.

The structure is known locally as Hutchins' Folly, a name that carries its own peculiarity. A folly, in the landscape design tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was a decorative building constructed primarily for visual effect or personal amusement rather than practical use, often built to look like a ruin even when new. This one is said to have been commissioned in the early nineteenth century by an American named Hutchins, though little else about him appears to have been recorded. The castellated detailing, the rough rubble construction, the elevated position overlooking the Kealnagower stream to the north; all of it points to someone with a taste for romantic atmosphere and enough means, or eccentricity, to act on it. That the builder was American adds a layer of curiosity to the whole thing, hinting at the transatlantic movement of a certain kind of picturesque sensibility into the Kerry landscape.