He was a kindly old man, with a face like a walnut shell, and white hair and beard like a jack-in-the-box.
'We want to get to the tower,' Alice said.

'Is it a ruin, or not ?' 'It ain't no ruin,' the man said; 'no fear of that! The man wot built it he left so much a year to be spent on repairing of it! Money that might have put bread in honest folks' mouths.' We asked was it a church then, or not.
'Church ?' he said.

'Not it.

It's more of a tombstone, from all I can make out.

They do say there was a curse on him that built it, and he wasn't to rest in earth or sea.