The signal tower that once stood here at Barry's Head was demolished sometime before the late nineteenth century, and today an overgrown patch of rough ground is the only physical trace of a building that was, for a decade or so, a node in one of the most ambitious early-warning systems ever attempted around the Irish coast.

The tower was built around 1804 to 1805 by the British Board of Ordnance, part of a chain of more than eighty signal stations constructed in direct response to the threat of a French invasion fleet under Napoleon. The system ran clockwise from Dublin Bay all the way around the coast to Malin Head in County Donegal, with each station in visual range of the next. Signalling was carried out using a naval signal post, essentially a mast and flags operating on a codified system borrowed from the Royal Navy. The tower at Barry's Head was a compact, square structure, probably two storeys over a partial raised basement, measuring roughly 5.8 metres on each side. A map drawn by Hamilton in 1806 shows it sitting within a narrow rectangular enclosure with a distinctive fan-shaped bulge at the southeastern end; the Ordnance Survey six-inch map surveyed in 1841 to 1842 records much the same arrangement, with the enclosure measuring approximately 64 metres by 40 metres at its widest. By the time the second Ordnance Survey edition was surveyed, between 1897 and 1904, the tower had vanished from the map entirely, though the enclosure outline remained. The chain was abandoned by the mid-1810s once the prospect of French invasion had faded. Its nearest surviving neighbours in the chain are the station at Robert's Head, Britfieldstown, about 6.7 kilometres to the northeast, which remains in relatively good condition, and the tower at the Old Head of Kinsale, around 13.7 kilometres to the southwest, which was renovated around 2015 and now operates as a visitor attraction. The Barry's Head site also sits close to the remains of Barry's Castle, set within a coastal promontory fort at the tip of the headland, a promontory fort being a defensive enclosure that uses the natural cliff edges as its boundary on most sides, leaving only the landward approach to be fortified.