That choice of template is deliberate and personal: the man who commissioned it, Gerard Robert Browne Clayton, had been present at the Battle of Alexandria on 21 March 1801, the engagement in which British and allied forces under Sir Ralph Abercrombie defeated Napoleon's army in Egypt. A spiral newel staircase runs up through the interior, allowing those who can gain access to emerge at the very top.

Browne Clayton erected the column between 1839 and 1841 to his own design brief, with the architectural work carried out by Thomas Cobden. The result is an unusually learned piece of private commemoration: a landowner planting an Egyptian-inspired classical column on a Wexford hillside to mark a battle he had survived four decades earlier. The monument's subsequent history has been eventful. In late December 1994 it was struck by lightning and badly damaged, the incident reported in the New Ross Standard in January 1995. It might easily have been left to deteriorate, but the Wexford Monument Trust Ltd. acquired the land and undertook a programme of repair and conservation completed in 2003, funded through a combination of local and international contributions.