What is less often remarked upon is that several of them came with batteries attached, and that one such battery has survived in Killiney, tucked into a suburban housing area east of the Killiney Hill Road, sitting some 250 feet above sea level and a quarter of a mile inland from the shore it was built to defend. It is an odd thing to encounter: military stonework of considerable purpose, now absorbed quietly into the residential fabric of south County Dublin.

The tower and battery at Killiney are numbered 7 in the sequence of Dublin-area coastal defences, a chain constructed in response to the threat of Napoleonic invasion. Work on the Dublin towers commenced in 1804 under the supervision of Colonel Benjamin Fisher of the Royal Engineers, and by December 1805 every tower in the network had been armed and declared complete. A Martello tower, for those unfamiliar with the form, is a small, round, thick-walled fortification, typically two storeys, designed to mount a cannon on its roof and resist artillery fire. The battery here, a low defensive enclosure built to hold guns in an open emplacement, was a three-gun position armed with 24-pounders, linked to the tower on its south-east side. A single-storey structure was built against the tower and at the rear of the battery, and access between this lower building and the first floor of the tower was provided through a vertical recess cut into the thickness of the tower wall itself, a neat piece of military engineering that suggests these elements were designed to work as an integrated system.

The site sits east of the R119, Killiney Hill Road, in what is now a built-up residential area, which means locating it requires a certain willingness to navigate ordinary streets rather than open landscape. Both the tower and the battery are recorded as surviving, making this one of the more complete examples of the tower-and-battery pairing in the Dublin coastal sequence. The lean-to slate roof that once covered the single-storey rear structure has reportedly been removed in recent years, so the stonework is more exposed than it once was. Visitors with an interest in Napoleonic-era coastal defence, or in the practicalities of early nineteenth-century military construction, will find the Kerrigan study of 1995 a useful companion for understanding what they are looking at.