Locally it has long been known as the Cock House, and what survives today is an oddly elegant ruin: the roof is gone, sections of wall have fallen away, and what remains is essentially a sequence of tall windows running from floor to ceiling level, open now to the sky and weather they were presumably once designed to admire from a comfortable distance.

The building sits close to the Old Court, the historic house of the area, and its octagonal form and elevated position suggest it may have functioned as a gazebo, one of those small ornamental structures built in demesne gardens to allow the household to take the air and the view. But the name complicates that reading. Cockfighting, once a common if brutal pastime among the gentry and working population alike, is a plausible alternative origin, and the cellar beneath the building, entered from the east side, would not be out of place in that context. Whether it was built for leisure of the genteel or the bloodsport variety, perhaps both in succession, is not recorded. The name 'Old Weather Cock' on the mid-nineteenth-century map adds another layer of ambiguity, suggesting that even then the building's original purpose was either forgotten or being politely reinterpreted.