The detail is easy to pass over, but it is genuinely unusual: an enclosed order of Franciscan nuns, the Poor Clares being a branch of Franciscan life committed to contemplative poverty, taking responsibility for a beacon tower as part of their daily duties. The practical and the devotional were not always as separate as we might assume in medieval religious life, but nuns tending a navigational light is still a striking arrangement.

The Convent of St Anne at Knockaverry was founded around 1190, and according to later historians the community there maintained the beacon tower that served mariners along that stretch of coast. The convent itself did not survive the upheavals of the seventeenth century; by 1644 it was no longer standing. The tower, however, outlasted it by two centuries. A circular stone structure roughly twenty-four feet high and ten feet in diameter, it remained on the headland until 1848, when it was demolished to make way for the present lighthouse. The decision was purely practical, the old masonry cleared to provide materials or space for the new structure, and with it went the last physical trace of the medieval convent and its unusual maritime role.