The structure present today, roughly 11 metres by 6 metres, clad in crumbling cement render with red brick peeping through at the corners, bears almost no resemblance to the compact square-plan towers found elsewhere along the Irish coast. Fragments of moulded concrete cornice lie scattered across the site, a section of overhanging flat roof still projects from the north-east end, and a flight of concrete steps descends the same side before turning sharply towards the cliff edge. Whatever this building is, it has been substantially remade.

The original tower here was completed by 1805, part of a network of over eighty signal stations constructed by the British Board of Ordnance to watch for an approaching French invasion fleet. The stations formed a continuous coastal chain running clockwise from Dublin Bay all the way to Malin Head in Donegal, each one communicating with its neighbours using a naval signal post, a mast-and-flag system for relaying visual messages at speed. This tower's nearest neighbours in the chain were at Ballydavid Head, about 8.85 kilometres to the north-east, and on Great Blasket Island, roughly 10.8 kilometres to the south-south-west; both are now largely or partially collapsed. The network was abandoned by the mid-1810s once the threat of French invasion had passed, which explains why the site was already going to ruin when the first Ordnance Survey teams arrived in the 1840s. A secondary building appeared beside the original by the time of the late nineteenth-century surveys, and the site was later reactivated by the Royal Navy as a Naval War Signal Station during the First World War. It is this period of reuse, around 1900 to 1920, that is thought to account for the building's current form, though whether the original tower fabric was incorporated into the new structure or simply demolished and replaced remains unclear.

The site sits on a small artificial terrace cut into the top of a steep slope, with near-vertical cliffs dropping away to the north and north-west, and Ferriter's Cove lying roughly 1.6 kilometres to the south-east. A low concrete plinth wall along the cliff edge was once the base for a metal railing, the earlier rubble stone enclosure wall having been lost to erosion. Uphill of the building, close to the cliff edge, a circular metal mounting plate survives in place, and a small square stone structure to the south-west of the building may be the original mast mount. About 1.2 kilometres to the north-north-west lies the promontory fort at Doon Point, Dún an Fheirtéaraigh, a site of quite different antiquity, which gives some sense of how layered this particular stretch of coastline is.