Rather than a tall tower, the original light here took the form of a stone-vaulted cottage, a compact domestic building where a keeper and his family would have lived in two or three rooms, with an internal stone stairway rising between the rooms to a platform on the roof. Up there, instead of a lantern, sat a coal-burning brazier, sometimes called a chauffer, an open fire meant to guide mariners past a famously dangerous headland.

The cottage was built around 1670, making it one of the earliest known lighthouse installations in Ireland. The domestic logic of its design reflects the period's approach to lighthouse-keeping as a household occupation rather than a technical one, the family essentially living inside the mechanism. It did not last long in continuous use; the light fell into disuse during the latter part of the seventeenth century before being re-established in 1720. What survived that period of abandonment and subsequent rebuilding is a portion of the original cottage, its battered outer wall, the slight outward lean or taper characteristic of early rubble construction, still standing near the later lighthouse keepers' dwellings at the head.

The remnant is unassuming, easily overlooked beside the more conspicuous later lighthouse, but the battered wall section near the keepers' dwellings is worth pausing at. It is a rare physical trace of a seventeenth-century attempt to impose order on one of the most exposed and fog-prone points on the Irish coastline, using nothing more sophisticated than a domestic hearth and a rooftop platform.