It was built some time around 1860[6] by Onesiphorus Randall (1798–1873) – a locally born man who had made his fortune as a London property speculator – and sat on a mound of land called the "Great Eye" (shown on later maps as "Lodge Hill").

[1] After Randall's death, the building was purchased by the Board of Trade for use as a coastguard station, equipped with a rocket cart and an adjacent cannon, for the deployment of a breeches buoy.

[2][3] She described the house in a 1950 letter to Alyse Gregory:[2] ...I think Valentine will have told you about the Great Eye Folly.

It is the sort of house one tells oneself to sleep with, and sometimes I almost suppose that it is really one of my dream-houses, and no such solid little assertion of the rectangle breaks the long sky-line of salt-marsh and sea.The building was badly damaged by the North Sea flood of 1953 and was demolished in June 1956.

[3] A painting of the folly by John Arnesby Brown, titled The Watch Tower, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1923; the work is now in the Laing Art Gallery, who also hold a letter from Brown, describing the work's setting.