Ned’s Point Fort, Tullyarvan, Co. Donegal

The tower's north-east face is cut at an obtuse angle, lined with musket loops set diagonally so that defenders could fire along the length of the dry ditch below rather than straight across it. Similar loops appear in the battery walls and parapet at the same level. It is a design found in only a handful of other places in Ireland, at the mouth of the Shannon, at Shannonbridge, and across the water at Rathmullan, and seems to have had no equivalent elsewhere in British coastal fortification.

The site's military history reaches back to 1798, when it was one of six temporary batteries thrown up around Lough Swilly against the threat of French invasion. Its early guns, including a 42-pounder, were taken from La Hoche, the French warship captured that year with Wolfe Tone aboard, an episode that ended the United Irishman's campaign for French-backed rebellion. What stood at Ned's Point remained makeshift until 1806, when plans were drawn up for a permanent battery costing around £6,000, comprising a two-gun tower and a four-gun battery. The Ordnance Office approved a reduced estimate of £5,450 in 1809, and by 1817 the fort carried four 24-pounders and two 5.5-inch howitzers. It was substantially reworked around 1895, when two 6-inch breech-loading guns and two 64-pounders were sanctioned; by 1906 the 6-inch guns were in place, the tower had been reduced in height, and the interior reorganised around twin gun emplacements with a basement magazine between them. A separate concrete practice battery for the 64-pounders, with six emplacements on pivots and iron tracks, cartridge recesses and rangefinder positions, was built to the north-east around 1900. Lough Swilly's defence shifted decisively to Dunree and Lenan by 1913, and Ned's Point was stood down, one of a chain of batteries around the Lough that also included Inch Fort, Muckamish, Rathmullan and Knockalla.

The entrance survives as a segmental archway with a dated keystone reading 1812, flanked by machicolations, reached by a curved sunken way cut through the glacis, the sloping bank once kept clear so attackers had no cover approaching the walls; it is now maintained as lawn. The fort was refurbished by Buncrana Town Council in the early 1990s, though it is currently closed to the public. An RNLI boathouse and slipway sit just to the south, and from the headland the views run north, west and south across the whole sweep of the Lough, the same sightlines that made the position worth building on in the first place.