It was built not for defence or habitation but as a folly, one of those deliberately romantic structures that 18th and 19th-century landowners commissioned to ornament their estates with a suggestion of antiquity. The stone walled boundary running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west connects directly to the tower's north-east and south-west faces, indicating that the wall and the tower were conceived together as a single feature rather than accumulated over time.

When the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1839 to 1840, the structure was recorded simply as a 'Tower'. By the time the second edition appeared in 1903, it had already become a 'Tower (in Ruins)', a quiet measure of how quickly an ornamental building, lacking any practical reason to be maintained, could fall into neglect. The tower's external footprint is modest, roughly 4.1 metres by 4 metres, with an interior of just 2.45 metres by 2.4 metres, so it was never intended to house anyone comfortably. It rose to at least three storeys and featured large pointed window openings, the kind of Gothic detailing that gave follies their air of theatrical melancholy. Today it survives only to roughly halfway up what would have been the second floor. A doorway in the north-east wall at ground level remains identifiable. The tower is sometimes mistaken for a remnant of the genuine medieval tower house that stands 135 metres to the north-east, but the two are unrelated. A third tower, probably built at the same time as the folly, once stood 76 metres east of that tower house; almost nothing of it remains, just a scatter of overgrown stones reaching no more than half a metre in height.