A few courses of masonry still break the surface at what was once the northern tip of a sand-spit roughly three kilometres long, but the narrow neck of land that connected the site to the shore has long since washed away, leaving the whole complex stranded and inaccessible.

The tower was constructed in 1805 to 1806 at a cost of £2,300, one of dozens of squat, round defensive structures built along the Irish coastline during the Napoleonic wars, when a French landing was considered a genuine threat. By 1819, when the surveyor Shaw-Mason recorded the settlement, there was a small community clustered nearby: eleven houses around a square and two more outside it, a modest but functioning place that the tower would have overlooked. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1839 marks a rectangular tower, roughly eighteen metres east to west and thirteen metres north to south, at the northern end of the spit, which is likely the same structure or its immediate predecessor. The fort it served, catalogued separately, sat a little to the south.

The sea has since reclaimed most of what existed there. The sand-bar that once made the site reachable is gone, and the walls visible above the waterline are all that remain of a small military outpost and the community that grew up in its shadow.