Compact and carefully built, with rendered walls inside and out and dummy windows set into its upper storey, it was constructed to look convincingly like a medieval tower house, the kind of squat fortified residence that genuine landowners across Ireland inhabited during the late medieval period. It is not one, however. The windows are false, decorative blanks in the stonework, and the whole structure was raised not for defence or habitation but as an architectural conceit.

The building dates from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, a period when wealthy landowners across Britain and Ireland occasionally commissioned follies, ornamental structures designed to evoke antiquity or add visual interest to an estate landscape. This one was modelled closely on the tower house form, that familiar silhouette of Irish rural history, and executed with some care: the flat limestone slabs are well coursed and well mortared, the walls are a solid sixty centimetres thick, and a real door opens at ground level on the eastern face. The result is a structure that reads, at a glance, as genuinely old. Set in open rolling grassland with long views in every direction across the valley, it would have functioned as a landscape feature visible from some distance, a piece of architectural theatre in the countryside.