[5] The upper part of the building is thought to have been added to add the effect of a romantic ruin and the change in stone can be seen at the two gable ends.

[2] The Newcomen engine drained the mine to a depth of around 50 metres which was sufficient to allow the miners to work the Blind Coal seam.

[4] The engine house ruins show that a considerable amount of attention to detail was undertaken to build the tower house with an authentic appearance, although the walls are not unduly thick, with a reportedly vaulted ground level, a water spout; randomly placed windows; a corbelled parapet on the east and south side; crow-stepped gables and on the north-east a turret that was once a chimney as evidenced by soot within and two access flue, one from within the main building.

[7] The south-facing gable end has a crow-step feature which is slightly offset from the main wall and has the roof angle trace marked upon it.

The stone type and quality of the crow-step feature and the side building to the west suggest that they were later structures and that the castle-features were a later addition to a previously normal engine house.

A similarly built lower lean-to building, with corbels, adjoins the western side of the tower, which may have later housed the supply of coal or a boiler and furnace.

[8] It is recorded that a flag pole on the tower was used to signal that coal was waiting to be uplifted and wagons would be hauled to the colliery along the railway, making it an early form of signal box and it is also suggested that tokens were given in at the tower for each wagon as a way of keeping a tally of the number of loads of coal produced.

[9] The engine had its wooden beam replaced by a cast-iron one in 1837 and the 96-inch-long cast iron cylinder had a 30-inch bore and a stroke of 54 to 60 inches.

The kiln eyes are still in good condition and unusually the rectangular iron box and grate bars from which the quicklime was removed, a hazardous procedure, especially in wet weather.

[1] The ruins of a fairly substantial and basically U-shaped building, probably once a farm, survives at Blacksyke, located close by and slightly to the south-east of the tower and once connected by a lane to the nearby Ayr Road.

The OS Name Book of 1855-57 records that the old farm was occupied by labourers employed by the then proprietor Thomas Smith Cunningham Esq.