Baginbun Martello Tower, Ramstown, Co. Wexford

Martello towers were squat, thick-walled circular fortifications built in large numbers by the British authorities during the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century, when an invasion from French-controlled Europe seemed a genuine possibility. Dozens were erected around the Irish coastline, particularly at points where an enemy fleet might find a convenient landing. Baginbun was exactly such a place.

The headland itself carries a much older military memory. It was at Baginbun in 1169 that a small advance force of Hiberno-Norman knights and Flemish soldiers landed as part of the first wave of the Norman intervention in Ireland, a moment sometimes described as one of the hinge points of Irish medieval history. The tower that now occupies the area belongs to a far later phase of coastal anxiety, one shaped not by baronial ambition but by the fear of Napoleonic expansionism. The Ramstown townland location places it on the landward approach to the headland, positioned to cover the bay and signal along the coast to neighbouring installations.