The tower is the crossing tower, the structure that in a medieval church would have stood at the junction of the nave and transepts, and what makes it quietly remarkable is how much it still communicates about the building that once surrounded it. Stone flashing, the weatherproofing material used to seal the joins between a roof and a wall, remains visible on the west and east faces of the tower, ghosting the rooflines of a nave and chancel that have otherwise entirely vanished.

The Augustinian friary known as Red Abbey was founded during the reign of Edward I, placing its origins somewhere between 1272 and 1307. The community remained in continuous occupation through the medieval period and well beyond, surviving the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1541, at which point an inventory recorded the full extent of the buildings, until the rebellion of 1641 to 1642 finally broke that occupation. By 1873, the antiquarian Archdall noted that much of the church was still standing, which makes the subsequent loss of almost all of it a relatively recent one in historical terms. What remains of the tower repays close attention: the walls step back above a string course, a projecting horizontal moulding, between the third and fourth floors; overhanging water spouts project just below the parapet on three sides with four spouts and on the north side with three; and the ground floor is covered by a barrel vault, a continuous curved stone ceiling, with a central bell-hole cut through it. A door survives in the south wall of the first floor. Excavations in the vicinity have uncovered traces of medieval burials and walls, suggesting that the ground around the tower still holds material evidence of the wider complex.

The tower stands on the north side of Red Abbey Street, in a part of Cork city that preserves the name of the friary even as the friary itself has almost entirely disappeared. The asymmetry of the water spouts, three to the north and four on the other sides, is one of those small, unexplained details that rewards a slow look upward.