Tower houses were the fortified residences common across Ireland from the medieval period into the early modern era, typically featuring thick stone walls, a compact footprint, and defensive upper storeys. The Finglas example is no longer visible at ground level, yet a 17th-century drawing of the village preserves its outline in enough detail to tell us something of what it looked like: a battlemented parapet running along the top, a gabled roof with chimneys, and ordinary domestic dwellings pressed up against it on either side.

The drawing, referenced by Maher in 1932, places the structure firmly within the streetscape of what would have been a modest but established settlement north of Dublin. Finglas had ecclesiastical significance well before this tower was built, with St Canice's Church as a focal point of the community. The fact that the tower house sat directly opposite the church, flanked by other buildings, suggests it had become part of the ordinary fabric of the village rather than sitting apart as a purely defensive structure. By the time someone recorded it in the 17th century, it was already a building in context, surrounded by neighbours.

Today there is nothing to see at the site itself. Church Street in Finglas has changed considerably, and whatever remained of the tower house has long since disappeared beneath later development. The value of this entry lies less in any surviving masonry and more in what the documentary record preserves. Anyone with an interest in the layered history of Dublin's older villages might find it worth walking the street with Maher's reference in mind, looking at the relationship between the church and the ground opposite, and considering that the gap between a 17th-century drawing and a 21st-century pavement can contain several centuries of quiet erasure.