A low spread of rubble, no feature rising more than about a metre, marks where a two-storey signal tower once stood. The tower was apparently demolished with dynamite sometime in the 1960s, which gives the site an odd distinction: it survived Napoleonic anxiety, Victorian neglect, and a century of coastal weather, only to be blown apart in living memory.

The tower was built around 1804 to 1805, part of a chain of more than eighty signal stations commissioned by the British Board of Ordnance along the entire Irish coastline. The purpose was specific and urgent: to relay warnings of an approaching French invasion fleet using naval signal posts, a system of flags and semaphore that could pass a message from Dublin Bay clockwise all the way to Malin Head in County Donegal. The station at Ballard sat between a tower on Mutton Island to the north-east, roughly ten kilometres away, and another at Knocknagharoon to the south-west, about fourteen kilometres distant. According to Paul Kerrigan's research, the mast was erected and the tower completed by 1805. Within a decade, the French threat had receded sufficiently that the whole network was abandoned. The Ordnance Survey mapped the site in the early 1840s and labelled it 'Telegraph Station'; by the time surveyors returned in the 1890s, their maps recorded it simply as 'Baltard Tower (in Ruins)'. The tower had already been a ruin for the better part of a century before it was dynamited.

What remains is more legible than the rubble alone suggests. The trapezoidal stone enclosure that surrounded the tower still partly stands, its internal walls reaching up to around 2.3 metres in places, with the original gateway on the south-east side still defined by two rubble stone piers. In the east corner of the enclosure, a small roofless rectangular building survives, complete with a chimneystack and fireplace at its north-west end, though its windows and doorway are now blocked or damaged. A late-nineteenth-century photograph confirms that the tower itself, before its demolition, followed the same compact square form seen at better-preserved signal tower sites elsewhere on the Irish coast.