The problem is that nothing of the sort exists there now, and the evidence suggests it may never have been a tower of any ancient significance in the first place. What the mapmakers recorded, approximately sixty metres to the north-east of the adjacent tower house, was most likely an industrial chimney stack connected to mining activity at Barrystown, misread, or perhaps romantically reinterpreted, as something far older.

The site sits on a gentle west-facing slope, and the broader complex includes a tower house and a rectangular walled garden to the north-east, roughly fifty metres north to south and forty metres east to west. The garden walls survive to around three metres in height and are approximately forty centimetres thick. Tower houses were the dominant form of defended residence in late medieval Ireland, and they were sometimes surrounded by a bawn, an enclosed courtyard with its own defensive walls, though no evidence of a bawn has been found here. Archaeological testing carried out in the area of the walled garden, under licence reference 10E0145, produced no material related to the supposed tower feature, lending further weight to the idea that what was plotted on the map was simply an industrial structure, now gone, that caught a surveyor's eye and acquired a misleading label.