This is not a ruin repurposed or a folly gesturing vaguely at antiquity; it is a purpose-built Victorian funerary structure, complete with crenellated parapet, corbelled stonework, ogee-headed stained-glass windows, and an oak entrance door with wrought-iron hinges, all executed with the kind of deliberate care that makes the building genuinely strange to encounter among the trees.

Kathleen de Kindiard commissioned the structure in 1897 to receive the remains of her father, and it took four years to complete. The architect was reportedly Francis Persse, the younger brother of Lady Augusta Gregory, who went on to co-found the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The family connection places this obscure building within a broader world of late nineteenth-century Irish cultural and landed life. The walls are of squared and snecked Wicklow granite with a battered base, meaning the stonework at the foot of the structure slopes slightly outward, giving it the solid, planted look of a genuine medieval tower. A tripartite stained-glass window to the rear was completed by Mayer of Munich, a firm well known across Europe for ecclesiastical glazing. Carved shields sit above the entrance, and the whole structure is raised on six granite steps, with the remains of four granite pillars still visible to the front of the clearing. Kathleen de Kindiard herself was eventually laid to rest in the crypt beneath the tower when she died in 1938, forty-one years after she had set the whole thing in motion.