On the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed between 1839 and 1841, a small rectangular outline marked with hachured lines appears on the Waterford coast near Islandikane, annotated simply as "site of Telegraph". The structure it commemorated was already gone. Whatever stood here, probably built around 1804 or 1805 as part of a coordinated British coastal defence effort, had vanished so completely and so quickly that the surveyors could record only its footprint and a memory of its purpose.

The tower at Islandikane was one link in a chain of over eighty signal stations constructed by the British Board of Ordnance along the Irish coastline to provide early warning of a French invasion fleet. Each station used a naval signal post, a mast with a system of flags or balls to relay coded messages, and the chain ran continuously clockwise from Dublin Bay all the way to Malin Head in County Donegal. By 1805, according to the historian Paul Kerrigan, the station at Islandikane was under construction and its signal mast had been raised. Its nearest neighbours in the chain were at Ballynarrid, Bunmahon Head roughly eleven kilometres to the west, and at Brownstown Head about 7.8 kilometres to the east; both are also now demolished. The system was abandoned by the mid-1810s as the threat of French invasion faded. What happened next in Waterford was unusual. Five of the county's six stations were torn down before the Ordnance Survey arrived to map the coastline, a rate of demolition markedly higher than in other counties. A likely explanation survives in a written complaint from 1811, when a Mr Pope, Waterford agent of the London Assurance Company, warned that the disused towers were being mistaken for lighthouses, particularly Hook Head in Wexford, by sailors navigating in poor weather. He linked this confusion to a number of shipwrecks near Tramore around 1810. His concern appears to have prompted at least one demolition, probably at Brownstown Head, before the year was out, and it is reasonable to suppose that others followed for the same reason.

The site today sits on a sandy peninsula with eroding dune-edged cliffs to the south, enclosed pastureland to the north, and a scatter of small offshore islands nearby. Within easy reach are two older layers of the same landscape: an Iron Age promontory fort at Sheep Island, parts of which have since slipped onto the eroding offshore islands, lies about 200 metres to the east-southeast, and the site of the medieval parish church of Islandikane, with its associated graveyard, sits roughly 780 metres to the north.