The two-storey gothick turret that once stood on the Inch House demesne at Purcellsinch, south of Kilkenny city, was one such structure. A folly, in the architectural sense, is an ornamental building designed for picturesque effect rather than use, and this one, with its gothic-revival detailing, would have been a deliberate piece of theatre set into the landscape behind the house.

The first Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839 to 1840, recorded it simply as a "Turret" sitting within a tree-ring, a circular plantation of trees that would have framed or partially concealed it, adding to the theatrical effect. By the time of the 1945 to 1946 revision it had become a "Turret (in Ruins)", already losing the battle against time. Maurice Craig, writing in 1973, described it as a two-storey structure with gothick features, and placed its likely date of construction in the mid-eighteenth century, which would put it broadly in step with the fashion for such ornamental additions to Irish landed estates of that era. The house it served, Inch House, was an eighteenth-century property set on a south-facing slope roughly 170 metres from where the turret stood, with a tributary of the River Nore not far to the east and the Kilkenny to Waterford railway line cutting across the landscape to the north-east. Neither the house nor the turret survived into the present. Inch House has been demolished, and the tree-ring and turret were cleared entirely during the construction of the Purcellsinch industrial estate. A large factory now occupies the ground where the folly once stood.