Its form is that of an Irish round tower, the slender stone pillars that medieval monks built as refuges and bell-towers in the early Christian period, but this one was raised in the 1850s as a deliberate imitation, a Victorian-era tribute dressed in an ancient idiom.

The structure, standing approximately 16.5 metres tall and built from local shale, was erected between 1857 and 1858 to commemorate the men of Wexford who died in the Crimean War, the conflict fought between 1854 and 1856 in which Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire opposed Russian expansion around the Black Sea. Choosing the round tower form was not accidental. By the mid-nineteenth century, the round tower had become a symbol of Irish identity and endurance, and using it as a war memorial allowed the monument to speak in two registers at once, honouring the dead while also grounding them in a distinctly Irish tradition. The tower sits within a ringwork, a type of earthwork enclosure consisting of a circular bank and ditch, which predates the monument by centuries and speaks to the long strategic importance of this particular vantage point above the river.