It was, instead, part of a deliberate piece of theatre, one of five towers built to ornament the boundary walls of the Bingham Castle House estate sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Follies of this kind were a fashionable affectation among landed estates of the period, used to give walls and grounds a grander, more antiquated appearance than the buildings themselves could honestly claim.

This particular tower occupied the north-west angle of the courtyard attached to Bingham Castle House. Alongside its four companions positioned elsewhere on the estate walls, it contributed to a composed landscape designed to impress and to evoke. The Bingham family, long associated with the wider region, were among the more prominent landowners in Mayo, and the layering of architectural ornament onto an estate was a recognisable way of projecting permanence and gentility. The tower did not survive long into the twentieth century, however, and was demolished not long after it had been built, leaving only its position in the courtyard corner as a record of what had briefly stood there.