Known locally as Enoch Tower, and attached to a property called Granagh, it has acquired a two-storey residential addition and a turret over the years, giving it the slightly incongruous appearance of a fortification that someone decided to move into. The doorway faces west, and a prominent string course, a horizontal band of masonry that marks the division between levels on the exterior wall, runs around the circumference in the manner typical of its type. Look north-east from the beach and you can pick out a second Martello tower on Dalkey Island, a reminder that this stretch of coastline was once considered seriously worth defending.

The tower is formally catalogued as Loughlinstown Martello Tower and Battery No. 6, part of a coordinated chain of coastal defences constructed around Dublin Bay during the Napoleonic era. According to the military historian Paul Kerrigan, work on the Dublin-area towers and their associated batteries began in 1804 under the direction of Colonel Benjamin Fisher of the Royal Engineers, and by December 1805 every tower had been armed and completed. Martello towers were squat, thick-walled circular fortifications, originally developed in response to the threat of French invasion, and the Dublin series ran in a numbered sequence south from the city. The numbering, however, is slightly deceptive: Kerrigan noted that while the towers and batteries south of Dublin were numbered from 1 to 16, there were in fact only fourteen towers, because two sites had batteries alone and no accompanying tower. A plan of this particular tower and its battery survives in the Irish Military Archives, and the site appears on John Taylor's 1816 survey map of the environs of Dublin.

The tower is accessible directly from the beach, which makes approaching it straightforward enough, though the setting is more rewarding when the tide is out and the full granite bulk of the structure is visible from the shoreline. The two-storey addition and turret are clearly later alterations, layered onto the original military form, so it is worth walking around the full circumference to read the different phases of construction in the stonework. The west-facing doorway, now incorporated into the domestic extension, was the original military entrance.