When archaeologists excavated the Danesfort site in 2007, ahead of improvements to the Kilcullen to Waterford road scheme, they uncovered the remnants of an early ironworking operation dating to somewhere between the first and second centuries AD, placing it squarely in the late Iron Age or very early early medieval period in Ireland.

The site sits on the southern slope of a U-shaped east-west valley, beside a small tributary that feeds into the King's River near the village of Ennisnag. What emerged during excavation was a modest but coherent industrial landscape. A probable smelting furnace and a possible smithing hearth, the hearth being where bloom iron, the raw spongy mass produced in smelting, would have been worked and shaped, were found alongside pits filled with slag, the glassy waste byproduct of iron smelting. Close by ran a linear field boundary ditch that appears to have been in active use at the time, since metallurgical waste had accumulated in its lower fills. A small metalled surface beside it may have served as a working platform, and four further pits along the ditch line all contained similar industrial debris. About 17 metres away, toward the northern edge of the site, lay the remains of what is thought to have been a charcoal production pit. Charcoal was the essential fuel for early furnaces of this kind, and its proximity to the smelting and smithing area suggests a tightly organised, self-sufficient operation. A radiocarbon date taken from the furnace returned a calibrated result of AD 7 to 125, a range confirmed by laboratory reference UBA-15552. The whole complex lay in close proximity to a ring-ditch, a type of circular earthwork enclosure often associated with burial or ritual use in the same period, though the relationship between the two features remains unclear.