In fact, the taper is the result of the money running out. The project simply stopped, leaving the structure shorter than anyone had planned, its top sealed off by a parapet wall rather than whatever grander finish had been intended. That abrupt truncation, though accidental, gives the tower at Ballygibbon an oddly poignant quality: an ambition preserved mid-sentence.

The tower was built in 1836 by Fr. Matthew Horgan, situated just south-east of a Roman Catholic chapel that had been completed nearly two decades earlier, in 1817. Its designer was John Windele, a Cork antiquarian with a keen interest in early Irish ecclesiastical architecture. The doorway Windele produced is finely carved in the Hiberno-Romanesque style, modelled specifically on the Nun's Chapel at Clonmacnoise, the celebrated monastic site on the River Shannon whose twelfth-century carvings are among the most accomplished of their period in Ireland. Hiberno-Romanesque work is characterised by richly decorated arched openings, interlaced ornament, and carved figured heads, all of which filtered through Ireland's own artistic traditions rather than arriving wholesale from the Continent. Several window openings in the tower carry both rounded and triangular heads, a detail that gives the structure a slightly composite feel, archaeological in spirit if not in strict chronology. A similar tower exists at Whitechurch in the same county, suggesting that Windele or his circle may have developed something of a regional type, though the Ballygibbon example carries the additional distinction of its unplanned, money-curtailed silhouette.