The hollow, roughly square in shape and measuring about 4.8 metres internally, is where the semi-basement of the tower was cut into the ground. No rubble survives around it, which suggests the masonry was carted away and reused somewhere else, probably not long after the tower was abandoned. By the time the First Edition Ordnance Survey Six-Inch map was being drawn up around 1837, the building was already absent from the landscape. A shallow, sunken lane, now grassed over, still runs from the tower site down toward the coast to the north-west, and a small oval depression nearby may be the remains of a lime kiln, a simple structure used to burn limestone and produce mortar, likely built to serve the tower's construction.

The tower was one of more than eighty signal stations built by the British Board of Ordnance in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The purpose of the system was straightforward and urgent: to relay warnings of any approaching French invasion fleet around the entire Irish coastline. Using naval signal posts, the stations formed a continuous chain from Dublin Bay, running clockwise all the way to Malin Head in County Donegal. This tower at Killcologue Point communicated with Streedagh Signal Tower, about 8.25 kilometres to the south-west, and with John's Point Signal Station, about 11.3 kilometres to the north. Both of those sites are now very low ruins and, crucially, can no longer be seen from Killcologue Point, which means the visual logic of the chain has been lost along with the towers themselves. By the mid-1810s, with the threat of a Napoleonic invasion receding, the whole system was wound down.

The site sits close to the base of a slope that descends to the coast, with open views to the north and west but rising ground blocking the outlook to the south and east. The surrounding pasture is bounded by low stone walls, and to the north of the tower site there are traces of lazy beds, the ridged cultivation strips once common across rural Ireland, which predate the field walls and speak to a different kind of land use entirely. About twenty metres to the north lies an eroded promontory fort, and roughly 680 metres to the north-east, atop a low rocky outcrop, a Second World War-era lookout post adds another layer to a coast that has been watched, in one form or another, for a very long time.