What was once a functioning military installation is now essentially invisible, yet aerial photography taken in 2015 revealed the faint outline of a sub-rectangular enclosure, roughly 37 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, suggesting that some trace of the site's organisation persists just beneath the surface.

The tower was part of a network of more than eighty signal stations built by the British Board of Ordnance along the Irish coast during the early nineteenth century, each positioned to relay warnings of an approaching French invasion fleet using naval signal posts, a system of flags and mechanical semaphore that could pass a message from one hilltop station to the next in minutes. The chain ran continuously from Malin Head in Donegal down to Dublin Bay, with this particular station linking Kilmichael Point to the south-south-west and Wicklow Head lighthouse to the north-north-east, both visible on a clear day from the level ground at Mizen Head. According to Paul Kerrigan's research, the tower here was likely completed by late 1804 and the signal mast was also in place by that point. The threat of French invasion faded through the 1810s, and the entire network was wound down before the middle of that decade, leaving stations the length of the coast to deteriorate quietly into their landscapes. The Mizen Head example appears to have fallen into ruin relatively quickly; it was already recorded as such on that first Ordnance Survey mapping, made only three decades after the tower was built.