Martello Tower, Bray, Co. Wicklow

A Martello tower once stood here on the Wicklow coast near Bray, one of a chain of squat, round-walled fortifications built along the eastern and southern coasts of Ireland in the early nineteenth century as a defensive measure against the threat of Napoleonic invasion. These towers, typically with walls over a metre thick and a single cannon mounted on the roof, were designed to slow any French landing force long enough for regular troops to respond. This one, catalogued as Martello Tower No. 1, is recorded on Taylor's map of 1816, which surveyed the environs of Dublin to a radius of ten to fourteen miles from the castle. By that date the tower was already a fixed feature of the local landscape, solid enough to be worth marking on a detailed survey.

Sometime after 1870, the tower was demolished. The cause was not neglect or deliberate clearance for its own sake, but the practical demands of railway expansion: the construction of the Ballygannon Railway extension removed it entirely. The Ordnance Survey's first edition map had recorded it still standing, which places its destruction in the window between that survey and the railway works. No visible surface remains survive today. The site offers no stone, no earthwork, no trace of the foundation that would have anchored a structure built to withstand cannon fire. What the railway giveth, the railway apparently taketh away.