Baginbun Martello Tower, Ramstown, Co. Wexford

It is neither. This is a Martello tower, one of a family of coastal defences built to a standard design around the coasts of Ireland and Britain in the early nineteenth century, and the family resemblance is precise: the same compact circular plan, the same battered walls narrowing towards the parapet, the same stone corbels supporting projecting "machicolations", a term borrowed from medieval castle-building for the gaps through which defenders could drop missiles on anyone unwise enough to approach the base of the wall. At Baginbun those machicolations are purely decorative echoes of that older military vocabulary, applied here to a much younger and more specialised structure.

The tower was built between 1804 and 1806, part of the wave of fortification that followed Britain's fear of French invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. Ireland's long, exposed coastline attracted particular attention, and towers of this type went up at exposed harbours and headlands the length of the country, following a prototype already established at Bartra in County Dublin in 1804 and at Bray in County Wicklow in 1804-5. What set these towers apart from earlier coastal defences was less their firepower than their construction and repetition: built fast, to a shared plan, in good-quality stonework, they were meant to be a visible and uniform line of resistance rather than isolated bastions. Baginbun's version, worked in a warm granite ashlar with a technique known as tuck pointing, in which fine ruled joints are picked out in a contrasting lime mortar to give the impression of very precise, regular stonework, shows the same care taken over a building whose purpose was ultimately watchfulness rather than ornament.

The tower has since been adapted for a use other than its original military one, and its grounds on the headland have been relandscaped, softening what would once have been a starkly functional setting. The cut-granite stringcourse running below the parapet, the coping along the top, and the corbelled machicolations remain the clearest survivals of its original design, worth looking for against the plainer battered walls beneath. Its position on the headland is itself part of the story: these towers were sited for sightlines along the coast, and Baginbun's still commands the kind of open outlook towards the sea that made it useful in the first place.