Telegraph (in ruins), Kilbaha, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Signal & Watch
On a ridge above the Loop Head coastline in County Clare, there is almost nothing left to see.
A shallow, square hollow in the ground, roughly eight metres across and less than a metre deep, is about all that survives of what was once a two-storey signal tower. The stone was carted away long ago, reused somewhere else entirely. What makes the spot quietly strange is that this near-total erasure sits inside a ringfort, a circular earthwork enclosure of early medieval origin, and the two structures occupied the same ground for at least a short period before the tower was pulled down or fell.
The tower at Kilbaha was built around 1804 to 1805, completed as part of a chain of over eighty signal stations erected by the British Board of Ordnance along the entire Irish coastline. The purpose was straightforward and urgent: to relay warning of an approaching French invasion fleet. Each station communicated with its neighbours using a naval signal post, essentially a mast with flags or lights, passing messages along the chain from Dublin Bay clockwise all the way around to Malin Head in County Donegal. The Kilbaha tower sat at a significant point in that chain, communicating northeastward to a station at Knocknagharoon, about 12.4 kilometres away, and southward across the Shannon Estuary to Kerry Head in County Kerry, some 16.6 kilometres distant. Both of those neighbouring stations have also since been demolished. The threat of French invasion faded by the mid-1810s, and the whole network was abandoned. By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in the 1840s, the tower was still shown as a small rectangular building inside the ringfort, but by the surveys of the 1890s and 1910s it had vanished from the record entirely, suggesting demolition came early. The rectangular enclosure associated with the station, visible on aerial photographs as low grassed banks measuring roughly 57 metres by 32 metres, is also absent from those early maps, pointing to a thorough clearance of the site not long after the tower was built.