The tower is gone. The sand spit itself is gone. The entire complex of buildings that accumulated at Fort Point over three centuries, a bastioned fort, a wooden lighthouse, a customs house, a Catholic chapel, a cluster of perhaps eleven courtyard dwellings, has been swallowed by the sea, leaving only the occasional fragment of masonry wall visible above the waterline, its original purpose now impossible to determine.

The tip of the sand spit was first fortified in the sixteenth century, appearing on a Boazio map as early as 1599, and was developed into a proper bastioned fort, a defensive enclosure with projecting angled corners designed to eliminate blind spots for cannon fire, in the 1640s. By the mid-seventeenth century it had become a working station for Revenue officers and river pilots guarding the shipping channel to Wexford town, roughly six kilometres to the west. The fort was renovated and re-armed during the 1798 rebellion, and a lifeboat station was added in 1859 following a major shipwreck nearby. The signal station itself had a slightly complicated birth: a signal tower was already under construction in 1804 when the project was halted and redesigned. It was decided instead to build a Martello tower, the squat, thick-walled circular towers erected across Ireland and Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, which would incorporate a signal station within it. Construction began in 1805 at a cost of £2,300, and the signal mast was erected the same year. The station formed one link in a chain of over eighty such stations built by the British Board of Ordnance stretching from Malin Head in Donegal to Dublin Bay, each positioned within sight of its neighbours and communicating by naval signal post. The nearest stations in the chain were at Hillcastle, about 10.9 kilometres to the south, and at Ballyconnigar on Blackwater Head, about 11.4 kilometres to the north-northeast. Coastal erosion had already damaged the Martello tower by 1819 and again by 1821, after which it was demolished. A small rectangular watchtower recorded on the Ordnance Survey map surveyed in 1839 to 1840 may have taken over some of its observational role. The entire signal chain was abandoned by the mid-1810s in any case, once the threat of French invasion had passed. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded the sandbar again in a survey of 1908 to 1909, the spit still existed; sometime after that, it did not.