Scattered across the low, wind-scoured tip of the Hook Peninsula are the physical remnants of at least three distinct periods of military and maritime anxiety: a Napoleonic-era signal mast, fragments of medieval buildings, a barrel-vaulted magazine, the shell of a foghorn house, and a concrete slab out near the cliff edge that is all that remains of a Second World War lookout post.

The signal station here was not a purpose-built structure. When the British Board of Ordnance established it in the early nineteenth century, as part of a chain of over eighty stations running continuously from Malin Head in Donegal down to Dublin Bay, they simply erected a signal mast within the already-existing lighthouse complex. By 1805 the mast was in place, and no other new construction was added to the site. The system was designed to relay warnings of an approaching French invasion fleet using naval signal posts, each station within sight of the next; on a clear day, the Brownstown Head Beacons across the water in Waterford, roughly twelve kilometres to the west, and the signal station at Baginbun's Martello tower, a solid cylindrical coastal-defence structure, about nine kilometres to the north-east, would both have been visible from here. The threat receded by the mid-1810s and the network was wound down. A flagstaff shown on the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map of around 1901, positioned roughly sixty metres west-south-west of the lighthouse outside the enclosure wall, may mark where that original mast once stood. A 1999 excavation by archaeologist Alan Hayden found the remains of a seventeenth-century or earlier enclosure around the lighthouse, though nothing that could be directly connected to the signal station.

The lighthouse sits within a large rectangular walled enclosure, approximately 132 metres by 105 metres, its rubble stone boundary walls already present when the Ordnance Survey first mapped the site in 1839 to 1840. A pair of identical two-storey keepers' cottages, built in the 1860s and later linked by a single-storey range, stand to the north-east. To the south of the tower are fragments of medieval structures and a twentieth-century observation building. The magazine to the west, with its distinctive barrel-vaulted concrete roof, and the concrete foundation of Lookout Post 16 further out near the rocky shore, are easy to walk past without registering what they are, but together they give the site an unusual density of overlapping uses, each generation finding the same exposed headland useful for watching the sea.