What remains of the walls barely clears head height on the best-preserved side, and the rubble fanning southward from the base suggests the whole structure simply toppled in that direction at some point after it was abandoned. The enclosure wall that once surrounded it on a roughly rectangular footprint of about 43 by 28 metres is almost entirely collapsed, and the northern side of that enclosure appears never to have been built at all, which raises its own quiet questions about the urgency, or lack of it, that attended the whole project.

The tower was constructed around 1804 to 1806 by the British Board of Ordnance as one link in a chain of over eighty signal stations built to watch for an approaching French invasion fleet. The system ran clockwise from Dublin Bay all the way around the Irish coastline to Malin Head in County Donegal, with signalling between posts carried out using a naval signal post, a semaphore-style arrangement familiar from the fleet. The Glinsce station sat between the Benwee Head station to the west-northwest, roughly 14 kilometres away, and the Creevagh station to the east, nearly 22 kilometres distant. Both of those neighbours are now also collapsed or demolished. The two-storey rubble-stone tower would have measured about 5.8 metres square, with fireplaces on both floors flanked by alcoves in the south wall, pairs of windows on the east and west elevations, and a first-floor entrance on the north side, accessible by an external ladder or stair, as was typical of the type. A small square chute low on the south wall hints at a semi-basement level. The whole network was decommissioned by the mid-1810s once the Napoleonic threat receded, leaving these towers to the weather.

There is an additional oddity to this particular site. The tower stands about 400 metres southeast of the Glensky Hill summit, at the edge of a ridge where the ground drops steeply to the south but rises to the north, which means the coast to the north is not actually visible from where the tower stands. It is possible that soldiers posted here walked or sent signals from a vantage point further along the ridge, relaying observations back to the tower rather than watching the sea directly from it. The result is a station that, even in its operational years, may have functioned at one remove from the thing it was built to observe.