The place-name itself does much of the talking. Lughil, in County Kildare, carries the townland designation "Furnace", a name that hints at industrial heat rather than pastoral quiet, and in 2003 archaeologists confirmed that something was indeed being smelted or fired in this stretch of the Irish midlands long before the motorway age arrived.

The discovery came about through the standard process of pre-construction archaeological testing that precedes major road schemes in Ireland. Ahead of the building of the M7 Heath-Mayfield Motorway, excavations at this site uncovered three possible bowl furnaces, along with associated post-holes and hearths. Bowl furnaces are among the simpler forms of early metalworking or smelting technology, essentially pit-shaped or bowl-shaped depressions in the ground used to concentrate and sustain heat, often with bellows introduced through a channel to raise temperatures high enough to work iron or other metals. The post-holes suggest timber structures nearby, possibly shelters or frames associated with the working process, while the hearths point to sustained, repeated activity rather than a single episode. The excavation was carried out under licence by Channing in 2003, and the site name recorded in the process, Furnace, suggests that local memory of this industrial use may have persisted in the landscape long after the furnaces themselves went cold.