Ballydavid
Head Loop.

1804 · A coast on watch

The ruined tower above the cliffs belonged to a coastal warning system built during the threat of a French invasion. Eighty-one station locations were proposed, with most towers constructed between 1804 and 1806. The account of Ballydavid records it working by 1805, with Sybil Head about nine kilometres to the south-west and Kerry Head nearly thirty-seven kilometres away in the other direction.

Messages travelled through combinations of flags and balls raised on a mast. Men at the next station watched for the signal and passed it along the coast. Mist could interrupt the chain: the long view from this headland was part of the machinery.

Reading the ruin

It was built like something expecting trouble. Two storeys, roughly five and a half metres square, and the only door was on the first floor, reached by a ladder the garrison could pull up after them. Above that door a machicolation, a projecting defence, let them deal with anything at the foot of the wall, and the two exposed corners carried bartizans. None of that survives. What the 2022 survey records is most of the north-west wall, standing to the top of the first floor, with its chimney flue and the fireplaces and alcoves still readable on the inside face.

What else is on the headland

The tower is not the only thing the loop passes. A metre off the recorded line, on the north side of Ballydavid beach and low enough for a high spring tide to reach, is Tobar Chiaráin. Ó Danachair found it in 1960 running strongly out of a pipe set in a new road embankment, still visited on Christmas Day, Easter Sunday and Hill Sunday, with pilgrims leaving some small object behind them and many cures ascribed to the water. He photographed it in 1946.

Eleven metres off the line is a second fort, and a much quieter one than the tower. Several small headlands round Ballydavid Head would have suited, and only one was defended: a rectangular promontory barely thirty metres long and twenty-five wide, with the remains of a fosse and possibly a bank cut across its neck. Fifty-three metres away is a rath nearly twenty-seven metres across inside, its bank still 2.6 m high on the outside and faced with drystone walling, stepped at the west as though for a ramp or stair up to a terrace.

The end of the watch

Many signal stations were abandoned as the invasion threat receded after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. It had been watched for barely a decade. George Victor Du Noyer drew the tower and the buildings beside it on 12 June 1856, and his drawing still shows detail that has since gone.