The building is labelled simply as a turret on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map revised in 1947, and already noted there as a ruin. Its geometry alone sets it apart: an eight-sided two-storey structure with an internal diameter of 5.5 metres, built not for defence but almost certainly for the pleasure of the view.

The turret dates from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and its construction is a quiet mixture of materials and intentions. The walls, roughly 0.6 metres thick, are limestone rubble, but brick was brought in for the more refined work around the window reveals, the first-floor fireplace, and the chimney. Ten round-headed windows, five to each floor, give it a lightness unusual for a building of this scale. What makes it stranger still is where it stands: at the centre of a ringwork, an earthen or earthen-and-stone enclosure of the kind typically associated with early medieval settlement or defence, essentially a broad circular bank and ditch used as a fortified enclosure. Whoever commissioned the turret chose to plant it deliberately at the heart of this earlier structure, an act that was almost certainly theatrical rather than practical. A rectangular aumbrey, a small wall recess traditionally used for storage or display, survives in the northwest wall, and first-floor timbers remain in place, suggesting the interior has not entirely collapsed despite the ruin designation it has carried for decades. Aerial photography confirms the turret sitting squarely atop the older earthwork, the two structures separated by perhaps a thousand years of history.