Along the stretch of coast north of Crofton Road and York Road in Dún Laoghaire, opposite Crofton Terrace, there is no trace of the Martello tower and artillery battery that once occupied this ground. Battery No. 13 and its companion tower have left no surface remains whatsoever, and the busy suburban streetscape gives no hint that a small but deliberate piece of coastal fortification once stood here on a cliff edge overlooking what is now one of Ireland's busiest harbours.

The story of how they came and went spans roughly six decades of considerable change. Construction of the Dublin-area Martello towers, squat cylindrical forts built to resist a possible Napoleonic invasion, began in 1804 under the supervision of Colonel Benjamin Fisher of the Royal Engineers. By December 1805, all towers in the network were armed and ready. Taylor's 1816 map of the Dublin environs shows Battery No. 13 positioned to the north-east of its Martello tower, set into the east-facing cliff edge looking out over the coast. The ground beneath the tower may itself have carried significance long before the British military arrived: Reverend Stokes, writing in 1893, identified the site as a possible promontory fort, a type of enclosure using a natural headland as part of its defences, and noted it as the 'Dun of Dunleary', the very place-name from which Dún Laoghaire derives. By 1834, the landscape was shifting again. P.D. Hardy, documenting the new Dublin and Kingstown Railway, recorded that the line would pass directly between the Martello tower and the battery, threading through the narrow gap opposite Crofton Terrace. The railway's arrival signalled the area's transformation from defended coastline to commuter corridor. In 1862, the battery was relocated to the head of the East Pier of the new harbour, repurposed rather than simply abandoned.

For anyone curious enough to visit, the area around Crofton Road and York Road offers no ruins to examine and no interpretive signage to consult. The value of coming here is largely imaginative, a matter of standing on ground that has been, in sequence, an early medieval fortified headland, a Napoleonic-era gun battery, a landmark straddled by one of Ireland's first railways, and now an unremarkable patch of suburban Dún Laoghaire. Taylor's 1816 map, available through digital archive collections, is the clearest guide to where things actually stood. The East Pier of the harbour, where the battery was eventually moved in 1862, is a short walk away and considerably easier to find.