The tower has been gone since 1848, yet its story quietly reframes what we tend to assume about who kept the lights burning on the medieval Irish coast.

Built in 1190 by Maurice Fitzgerald, the structure was modest by any measure: circular, roughly twenty-four feet high and ten feet in diameter, with a single narrow pointed doorway facing the east point of the harbour. Inside, a flight of spiral stone steps climbed past two large circular-headed windows, one looking out over the middle of the bay, the other oriented towards Capel Island. The tower was maintained by the community of Franciscan nuns at the adjacent convent of St Anne, and it served that purpose for well over three centuries. When the dissolution of religious houses reached Youghal in 1542, the nuns were dispersed and the light was simply extinguished, with no replacement recorded. By the early nineteenth century the tower had fallen into ruin, and in 1848 it was dismantled entirely to make way for the three-storey granite lighthouse that occupies the site today. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, O'Sullivan recorded the recollection of an elderly local man who remembered seeing the remains of the old lighthouse and, beside it, the remnants of the little convent, on the path leading down to the Diving Rock.

Nothing of the medieval tower survives above ground, and the granite lighthouse that replaced it is a working structure rather than a heritage site. What remains is largely a matter of topography and imagination: the Cliff road, the view across towards Capel Island, and the faint outline of an arrangement, a small religious house and its attendant tower, that once made this corner of the Youghal shoreline function as something more than a quiet stretch of coast.