There is nothing to see at ground level, and yet the site carries a name weighty enough to have been mapped and recorded for nearly two centuries: Cromwell's Fort, marked as such on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1841.

By the time the topographer Samuel Lewis wrote about the area in 1849, even the structure itself had been reduced to what he called "the remains of a tower", situated near the ferry crossing or Sound at Kenmare. The association with Cromwell, whose campaigns through Ireland in the early 1650s left a scattered trail of fortifications and a lasting shadow on the landscape, may reflect actual construction from that period or may simply be the kind of folk attribution that attached itself to any sufficiently old or forbidding ruin. Without more detailed investigation it is impossible to say which applies here. What the historical record does confirm is that something stood on this promontory, commanding what are still extensive views in every direction across the bay and surrounding hills, and that it was considered significant enough to name and map at a time when the physical remains were already fading.