Nothing survives above ground of the early nineteenth-century barracks that stood here, and yet the site speaks to an oddly specific problem in military communications: what do you do when your carefully planned chain of signal towers cannot actually see one another?

The Irish coast signal tower network was constructed between 1804 and 1806, a response to the threat of French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. Towers were spaced so that each could relay visual signals to the next, but in County Kerry the coastline's deep inlets and headlands made unbroken intervisibility difficult in places. The solution, applied at four locations around Kerry, was the enclosed barracks, a more substantial type of installation built somewhere between 1808 and 1812. At Rough Point, the structure dated to around 1810. The Ordnance Survey first-edition six-inch map, surveyed in 1841 and 1842, records what was there before demolition: a rectangular enclosure roughly 24 metres by 19 metres, with square bastions projecting from each corner, and a large T-shaped building set into the south-eastern portion. That distinctive T-plan, with freestanding external steps rising to a first-floor entrance, appears to have been a standard form for these Kerry barracks, closely resembling surviving or recorded examples at Bolus Head and Hog's Head. Whether the Rough Point barracks housed a larger crew than a standard tower, or simply offered the same-sized crew somewhat better conditions than the notoriously uncomfortable towers, is not known. The whole network along the south-west coast was decommissioned in 1815, and the Rough Point site was presumably abandoned at the same time. Its three Kerry counterparts, at Brandon Head, Kerry Head, and Ballydavid Head, have all either collapsed or been demolished, leaving the Ordnance Survey map as the principal record of what this chain of installations looked like on the ground.