The structure collapsed around 1990, but a Cork Archaeological Survey team had documented it two years earlier in enough detail to reconstruct its form. What survives now is the base of the ground floor and partial basement, the interior choked with fallen stone, the enclosure walls around it largely tumbled into the rough pasture. Doo Lough lies about 175 metres to the west, and the ground drops sharply on either side of the ridge toward the Atlantic coastline.

The tower was completed by 1805, built by the British Board of Ordnance as one link in a chain of more than eighty signal stations that ran clockwise around the entire Irish coast from Dublin Bay to Malin Head in County Donegal. The purpose was straightforward and urgent: Napoleon's navy was considered a genuine threat to Ireland, and the system was designed to relay warnings of an approaching French fleet using naval signal posts, passing the alarm from station to station in rapid succession. The Sheep's Head tower sat roughly midway between its nearest neighbours, with the Bere Island station about 10.5 kilometres to the north-north-west and the still well-preserved Mizen Head station around 10.6 kilometres to the south. When the threat of French invasion receded in the mid-1810s, the whole network was abandoned. The 1806 map by Hamilton shows the tower within a narrow rectangular enclosure with a rounded southwest end; by the time of the first Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping in 1841 to 1842, the enclosure had taken on the longer sub-rectangular form with rounded ends that is still faintly legible on the ground today, along with a smaller internal enclosure and a square yard immediately south of the tower.

The site sits on uneven, rocky terrain near the crest of the ridge that runs along the final section of the peninsula, about 2.6 kilometres from its tip. The collapsed state of the tower means there is little to read architecturally at ground level, but the footprint of the enclosure system, running roughly 124 metres along its long axis, gives a sense of how much infrastructure once supported what might appear, from a distance, to have been simply a small lookout post.