A plaque set halfway up its shaft reads simply "this pier erected 1769", and by 1837 it had acquired a name: Lows Folly, as it appears on the Ordnance Survey Fair Plan Map of that year. A folly, in the Georgian landscape tradition, was a deliberate architectural conceit, built for visual effect rather than function, typically to punctuate a designed landscape or terminate a view. This one sits atop a steep knoll at 338 feet above sea level, commanding wide views across the surrounding Westmeath countryside.

The ringfort itself, a circular enclosure roughly 25 metres in diameter defined by a low earth and stone bank with no surviving external fosse, or defensive ditch, is considerably older than the pillar. Such raths were typically built during the early medieval period and served as enclosed farmsteads. By 1982, when the site was formally described, it was recognised that the fort had been deliberately incorporated into an 18th-century designed landscape feature, the knoll and its ancient earthwork repurposed as a raised platform for the folly. The pillar is built in rubble limestone, with a projecting cut stone band near its upper section and a shallow domed cap. A low stone wall curves around the base of the hillock in a semi-circular enclosure of approximately 100 metres in diameter, reinforcing the impression of a composed, intentional arrangement. The townland boundary with Lisnascreen runs along the south-western side of the site, following a field boundary oriented roughly north-west to south-east.