The ruins sit on exposed upland pasture, with the coastline roughly 1.3 kilometres to the west-southwest, and the irony of the site is fairly plain: a lookout post so frequently lost in cloud that one account claims it was never properly operational at all.

The station was part of a network of signal towers constructed around the Irish coast between 1804 and 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars, when invasion from France was a genuine concern. Where the towers could see one another clearly, they passed visual signals along the chain; where intervisibility proved difficult, a more substantial type of structure was introduced. This site belongs to that second category. One of four enclosed barracks of closely matching design built around County Kerry, it was probably constructed around 1810, and would have consisted of a T-shaped two-storey barracks building set within a roughly 24 by 22 metre rectangular enclosure with small square bastions, projecting fortifications, at each corner. A writer named Wakefield, describing the Kerry coast in a work published in 1812, noted the site as complete but unoccupied as early as 1808, though there is uncertainty about whether he was referring to this location or the nearby tower at Ballydavid Head to the southwest. A later writer, Mould, writing in 1994, claimed the station was never finished at all because mountain mists rendered it useless, though no source is given for this. The enclosure was decommissioned in 1815 along with the other signal towers of the southwest coast, and by the time the Ordnance Survey mapped it in the 1840s it was already recorded as in ruins. By the surveys of 1894 to 1898, the building within had disappeared entirely from the maps.

What remains today is largely spreads of collapsed rubble, though the outline of the enclosure is still legible, and the lower courses of the corner bastions were visible on inspection around 2014. The site sits about 1.2 kilometres southeast of a location traditionally associated with St Brendan, marked on early maps as Fohernamangh, and not far from a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort, at Baile an Chnocáin. The surrounding ground is unenclosed rough pasture, and the approach from any direction involves a significant climb.