The corner bartizans, small turret-like projections corbelled out from the angles of the wall, remain visible where the weather-slating stops short of them. The original door is now blocked and cement-rendered. A chimneystack rises from the rear wall. Someone, at some point in the mid-to-late twentieth century, decided this former military outpost would make a reasonable home.

The tower was one of more than eighty signal stations built by the British Board of Ordnance along the Irish coastline in the early nineteenth century, specifically to give warning of an approaching French invasion fleet. Completed in 1804, according to the historian Paul Kerrigan, it formed a single link in a continuous coastal chain running clockwise from Dublin Bay all the way to Malin Head in County Donegal. Communication between stations was carried out using a naval signal post, a system of flags and visual signals borrowed from the Royal Navy. The nearest stations in the chain were at Fort Carlisle, roughly 13 kilometres to the west, and at Knockadoon, about 15 kilometres to the north-east, which survives in comparatively good condition. The Ballymacotter tower sits around 750 metres back from Ballyandreen Bay, on the summit of a low hill that gives clear sightlines in most directions. By the mid-1810s, with the Napoleonic threat receding, the entire system had been abandoned. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the site in the 1890s and again in the 1920s, the surrounding enclosure had been partially dismantled and new agricultural buildings had appeared nearby. The later maps record the site, rather grandly, as Ballynacotter Castle, a name that says more about local memory than military history.