It is not a tower in any conventional sense, too narrow to shelter anyone, and not quite a monument in the commemorative tradition either. The Ordnance Survey mapped it as a 'Pillar' in 1840, then quietly reclassified it as a 'Tower' by the 1916 edition, a small cartographic inconsistency that hints at how uncertain its purpose has always been.

Locally it is called Bridgeman's Tower, after the family who owned Teernea House, the residence it was built to face. The structure measures roughly 1.75 metres by 1.8 metres at its base, solid masonry throughout with no interior space, which rules out most practical uses. The most plausible explanation offered is that it served as a flagstand, a raised platform from which a flag could be flown and seen from the house below. Flagstands of this kind were occasionally erected by landed families in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, functioning partly as a signal device and partly as a piece of landscape ornament, a way of marking territory and adding visual interest to a view from the main house. Whether the Bridgemans built it for ceremony, for signalling, or simply for the look of it across the pasture, is not recorded.