Nobody knows exactly where this signal tower stood. Its precise location on Mine Head, a small promontory in Monagoush Townland on the Waterford coast, has never been established with certainty, and the structure itself had already been pulled down before the Ordnance Survey came through to map the area in the late 1830s. What is known is that it was somewhere near the eastern corner of the townland, probably close to where a lighthouse was later built in 1851, roughly 200 metres north of Mine Head and about 110 metres from the coastline. By the time cartographers arrived, there was nothing left to draw.

The tower was part of a network of more than 80 signal stations erected by the British Board of Ordnance along the Irish coast between roughly 1804 and 1806, each one positioned within line of sight of the next, so that a warning about an approaching French invasion fleet could be relayed from Dublin Bay all the way around the coast to Malin Head in County Donegal. At Mine Head, the signal mast went up in 1804 and the tower was completed by 1806, according to research by Paul Kerrigan. Larkin's 1818 map of County Waterford still labels the site 'Telegraph', which was a common term for these naval signalling installations at the time. The nearest surviving station in the chain is at Ram Head, Ardmore, about 10 kilometres to the south-west, though it has been substantially altered. The station in the other direction, at Ballyvoyle Head, has also been demolished. What makes Waterford unusual within this national system is how quickly its towers disappeared: five of the six built in the county were gone before the first Ordnance Survey maps were made, a pattern not seen elsewhere along the Irish coastline. The likely reason involves a complaint made in 1811 by a Mr Pope, the Waterford agent of the London Assurance Company, who wrote to warn that derelict signal towers were being mistaken for lighthouses by mariners navigating in poor weather, and that this confusion had contributed to a number of shipwrecks near Tramore around 1810. The authorities apparently responded; a station near Tramore, probably at Brownstown Head, was demolished by the end of 1811, and it seems probable that others followed, Mine Head among them. The entire coastal chain was abandoned by the mid-1810s once the threat of French invasion had faded.