It is one of twelve such towers built north of Dublin in the early nineteenth century, each designed to mount a single 24-pounder cannon and each intended to discourage any Napoleonic force that might consider the Irish coastline an inviting approach. Unlike some of their counterparts to the south, none of the twelve northern towers was paired with a dedicated artillery battery, which gave this stretch of coast a slightly improvised quality even at the height of the threat.

Construction of the Dublin-area Martello towers, squat round forts of a design adapted from a tower at Mortella Point in Corsica that had impressed the British military, began in 1804 under the supervision of Colonel Benjamin Fisher of the Royal Engineers. By December 1805, all the towers were armed and complete. Balcarrick was designated Tower No. 6 in Paul Kerrigan's catalogue of Irish coastal fortifications, and it remained in the charge of the Royal Artillery until at least 1830, long after the Napoleonic threat had dissolved into diplomatic history. Its later life followed a pattern common to many such structures: eventual disposal into private hands. A man named John King rented the tower from 1896 and purchased it outright in 1909, by which point it had ceased to be anyone's idea of a military installation.

The tower is visible from the end of Balcarrick Road, and the walk to it is short. Up close, the fabric of the building tells a layered story. The rendered finish is original in character, and the machicolation above the door, a projecting parapet that would have allowed defenders to drop objects on anyone forcing entry below, survives intact. Two string courses ring the upper portion of the tower. The west-facing ground-level door has been altered, with some of the original stonework removed to accommodate a metal replacement, and the roofline has acquired a chimney and additional concrete blocks at some point in its residential life. A large south-facing window has been filled in with concrete. Taylor's map of the environs of Dublin, surveyed and published in 1816, marks the tower's position, which gives some sense of how early it had become a fixed point on the landscape rather than an active defensive work.