Please note the Martello tour rules: book in advance and do not smash the door.

During the “week” all sorts of attractions are open to the public, some for a couple of hours a day, others (like my Martello) for the entire nine-to-five period.

We know we’re successful because we start out with a lot of tours booked, and these grow throughout the week as people who’ve been on the tour tell other people about it.

Wayne, who serves coffee and croissants on the viewing platform where the three saunas are located, also encourages his customers to come and visit. It’s exciting to start out popular and become more popular in just a few days.

Now here’s the thing: more and more people are booking tours and contacting us online, by text, or by phone, and Bryan organizes them.

Bryan arrived at the tower almost 20 years ago with the original construction company that took it apart and rebuilt it. He fell in love with it and has stayed there ever since, doing everything from landscaping to booking tickets for Heritage Week.

The problem this time was that some potential visitors became impatient.

Their reasoning was that to hell with advance bookings. They would just turn up. Not a great idea, because if we have a tour booked for 10am, with six people, we can’t add anyone else to that number for health and safety reasons.

It’s no fun explaining that to someone who just happened to travel from Cavan, especially if you try to do it over the loudspeaker at the entrance. Although, to be fair, most people back out and negotiate a less crowded tour later on.

For some, however, the determination to see inside a Martello outweighs any possibility of turning back.

Hence the woman who broke down the door. I won’t mention her name, because I don’t know her name. However, I could easily identify her in a police lineup.

I saw her on the remote camera, pushing open the big farm gate like she was training for the next Olympics. I yelled at her. You have to yell at anyone outside the gate, as the speaker is a bit reticent and the wind can be strong. “Don’t push the gate!” I howled. “It’s an electric gate. You’ll break it.”

Either she didn’t hear me or she didn’t care, because I could see the door giving way and her disappearing from the camera as she walked down the driveway, triumphant.

Bryan was perplexed to find her on the grounds and asked how she got in. “Oh, no problem,” she told him. “I just opened the door.”

Bryan winced, knowing what that meant, and sent her off with instructions to email him with any reservations she wanted to make. He then surveyed the damage, which was extensive and required the immediate purchase of a new motor and mechanical arm, which he would install as soon as he was done leading people around the tower on guided tours.

In the meantime, anyone could get in and many did, forcing us to be ruthless in ordering them back down the long driveway, while at the same time feeling sorry for them.

People who book tours usually arrive 10-15 minutes early, which is great because they can have a coffee or tea and have the rules clarified.

For example: “You are welcome to take photos, but we ask that you do not take photos of family members.” Visitors are often surprised when they are allowed to take photos, even though some come with large, elaborate cameras.

Once we have them installed, the tour begins: “The 78 Martello towers of Great Britain and Ireland were built in response to the perceived threat of a maritime invasion by Napoleon.”

We mentioned other towers, such as the one in Portmarnock, now divided into two or three apartments.

On one of the tours, a woman nodded and said she had been on that one.

Everyone wanted to know what it had been like. She blushed and looked like she was reconsidering having mentioned it in the first place. It had been a long time, she confessed, and it was late at night and she had spent a good part of that night at Tamangos, the local nightclub, so her memories weren’t that clear.

Childhood summers

What is fascinating is the variety of reasons that draw visitors to the tower. Many of them spent their childhood summers on the beach below the tower, looking at the hideous mass and wondering what it must be like inside.

A subset of this group confesses to having climbed the walls back then to look at the fish pond and explore the grounds.

One man recounted how an acquaintance of his – an adult at the time – had lined the pockets of his coat with plastic so that he could put water and fish stolen from the pond into them to supply the fish tank at his home.

Some of the visitors are the wild swimmers I watch, morning to night, winter and summer, and sometimes they wave at me, though when they don’t wave back I find it devastating, though not as much as when visitors entering the tower are astonished to find me, but have the manners not to say “I thought you were dead.”

Last week, two groups of women were retired RTÉ producers and directors. Those tours were extended a bit, because how could they not be, with the women talking about the programmes they had made and the presenters they had made them with.

One of the best things about tours is when we meet repeat visitors.

One of them had visited for Heritage Week 15 years ago and had brought her sister and others because she had enjoyed it back then. Some had come more recently. One even came twice in the last week.

There were no babies this year. The youngest was seven and the oldest (I assume here) was about 70. She used a cane, which gave me a little tremor and made me wonder if she would be happy climbing the long, narrow spiral staircases.

There would be no problem, he told me firmly. In recent years, he sometimes leaned a little to the right and found that the stick helped to balance things out.

She was right: the spiral presented no difficulties, although the weather did present an occasional challenge due to heavy rains, which are problematic at ground level but spectacular on a Martello roof.

The interesting thing is that when people came back down, with their hair disheveled, they were excited and proud of themselves.

Of course, they were the ones who booked in advance and did not destroy the tower door.