', a name that stuck even though it was never a lighthouse. What survives on this exposed Kerry headland, with sea cliffs dropping sharply towards Ballinskelligs Bay to the north and Kenmare Bay to the southwest, is something more unusual: a fortified signal station barracks, complete with bastioned corner turrets fitted with gun loops, a rubble stone entrance ramp that once ended in a timber drawbridge, and the shell of a two-storey building whose rooms still bear the marks of shelving scored into the render.

The structure dates to around 1810 and belongs to a small group of four so-called Enclosed Barracks built along the Kerry coast, all of extremely similar form and all likely constructed between 1808 and 1812. They were additions to the network of signal stations and towers that had been established around the Irish coast between 1804 and 1806, put up in places where the line-of-sight between existing towers had proved unreliable. The signal station network was a Napoleonic-era defence system, allowing coastal watchers to relay information about approaching ships using flags or semaphore. What distinguishes the Enclosed Barracks from the simpler towers in that network is the degree of elaboration: the rectangular enclosure here measures roughly 26.5 metres by 23 metres, its boundary walls punctuated at each corner by square bastions with splayed gun loops designed to provide covering fire along every wall face. Inside the main building, six rooms are distributed across two floors, the side rooms each heated by corner fireplaces, the central rooms equipped only with plain alcoves. A signal mast probably stood somewhere on the site, though nothing of it remains. Whether the barracks were built to accommodate larger crews or simply to house the same crews in rather better conditions than the unpopular signal towers offered is not entirely clear. The whole complex was presumably abandoned by 1815, when the signal stations along the south-west coast were decommissioned, leaving the building to acquire its misleading lighthouse name over the following decades.

The ruins sit at around 119 metres above sea level on rough, open ground, with the main building still standing to close to its original wall height in places, particularly along the rear elevation which reaches about nine metres. The roof has collapsed, the south-eastern annex is largely gone, and the bastions have tumbled considerably, but the entrance ramp with its parapet walls is still intact, the gap where the drawbridge once spanned is still legible, and the interior retains patches of smooth render along with the incised shelving recesses that give the place an oddly domestic quality given how deliberately defensible the whole arrangement was designed to be.