What stands on Brownstown Head today gives no obvious indication that anything was ever demolished here. Two large cylindrical rubble-stone navigation beacons, built between 1819 and 1821, dominate the headland, and nearby sits a well-preserved Second World War lookout post. But somewhere among these structures, probably about sixty metres northeast of the tip of the headland, a signal tower once stood. Nobody now knows its exact position, its original form, or indeed quite where its stones went, though there is a reasonable suspicion that they were quietly recycled into those same beacons.

The tower was part of a network of over eighty signal stations constructed by the British Board of Ordnance in the early nineteenth century, strung in a continuous coastal chain from Dublin Bay clockwise around the island to Malin Head in County Donegal. Their purpose was to relay warnings of an approaching French invasion fleet using naval signal posts, each station within visible range of the next. The mast at Brownstown Head was erected by 1804 and the tower itself completed by 1805, linking westward to a station at Islandikane, about 7.8 kilometres away, and eastward to Hook Head in County Wexford, roughly 12.2 kilometres distant, where the existing lighthouse buildings were adapted to house the signal crew. The threat of invasion receded by the mid-1810s and the network was abandoned, but in Waterford the towers came down with unusual haste. Five of the six signal stations built along the Waterford coast between 1804 and 1805 had been demolished before the Ordnance Survey's first six-inch map series was even surveyed in 1839 to 1841, a pattern quite unlike the rest of the Irish coastline. The Brownstown Head tower does not appear on William Larkin's 1818 map of County Waterford, suggesting it was already gone by that date. The probable reason emerges from a written complaint made in 1811 by a Mr Pope, Waterford agent of the London Assurance Company, who argued that derelict signal towers along the coast were being mistaken for lighthouses by mariners navigating in poor weather, contributing to a series of shipwrecks near Tramore around 1810. His concerns appear to have been taken seriously, and a tower close to Tramore, very likely this one at Brownstown Head, was pulled down before the year was out.

Visitors to the headland will find the two stone beacons and the Second World War lookout post still intact and clearly visible on the open unenclosed ground. The signal tower itself has left no confirmed trace above ground, but standing between those beacons, it is difficult not to wonder whether the rubble beneath your feet was once put to rather different use.