Dursey Watch Tower, Tilickafinna, Co. Cork

Its first-floor doorway, which would originally have been reached only by a retractable ladder, is protected overhead by a machicolation, a projecting defensive gallery supported on three stepped cut-stone corbels, a feature more commonly associated with medieval fortifications than with early nineteenth-century military infrastructure. Small bartizans, corbelled corner turrets, project from the north and east corners, and patches of the original slate cladding survive near the parapet. The whole thing is oriented not to the cardinal points but diagonally, its walls facing northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest.

The tower was one of more than eighty signal stations built by the British Board of Ordnance along the Irish coastline in the first decade of the 1800s, each positioned to relay warnings of an approaching French invasion fleet using a naval signal mast. They formed a continuous chain from Dublin Bay running clockwise around the entire coast to Malin Head in County Donegal. The Dursey station sat between a station at Bolus Head in Kerry to the north-north-west, roughly 24 kilometres away, and one at Black Ball Head to the east, about 11.6 kilometres distant. A station at Hog's Island or Scariff Island, which would have been a closer northern neighbour at around 15 kilometres, may never have been built at all, though one was planned. The signal mast was erected and the tower completed by 1805, according to the historian Paul Kerrigan, and a map drawn by Hamilton in 1806 already shows the station within its rectangular enclosure with its distinctive rounded southwest boundary. The whole system was abandoned by the mid-1810s once the Napoleonic threat subsided.

The site holds one further historical layer. About 120 metres west of the tower, a large 'Eire 32' sign is marked into the landscape, a World War II-era feature painted or cut to identify the island's position and neutrality to aircraft flying overhead. The two structures together, one built against one European war that never reached these shores, the other made during a second one that Ireland formally sat out, give the hilltop an odd, layered quality that the surrounding rough pasture does little to diminish.