What visitors would find today is a low mound of collapsed rubble, roughly seven and a half metres north to south and six metres east to west, rising no more than a metre at its eastern edge and thoroughly colonised by nettles and briars. The name on the map is almost the only evidence that something deliberate once stood here.

The mound sits in the north-eastern quadrant of what appears to be an ecclesiastical enclosure on Inis Mhic An Trír, positioned about a metre to the east of another collapsed structure tentatively identified as a church. A field wall now runs between the two, and it incorporates what was once the tower's eastern wall, folding the remains of the building into the ordinary agricultural landscape of the island. Scholars including Gwynn and Hadcock, writing in 1970, and Paul Gosling, writing in 1993, have suggested the site as a whole may belong to an early monastic foundation. Ecclesiastical enclosures of this kind, roughly circular or oval boundaries that once marked out sacred ground around a cluster of religious buildings, are a characteristic feature of early medieval Irish monasticism, and the spatial relationship between the possible tower and the possible church is consistent with that pattern. Whether the tower served a defensive, residential, or liturgical function is impossible to say from what remains above ground.

The island's name, Inis Mhic An Trír, and its situation within Galway Bay mean access would require local knowledge and suitable conditions for a crossing. The rubble mound itself gives little away on inspection, but its location within what may be a surviving enclosure boundary, and the proximity of the possible church remains, rewards a slow look at the wider field pattern around it.