The place-name alone, Oxpark or Furnace, carries an industrial suggestion, and the ground appears to bear that out: buried here are the probable remains of a post-medieval blast furnace, a large-scale smelting installation that would have been a significant piece of industrial infrastructure in its day, yet one that has left almost no trace above ground.

The site came to light not through chance but through the machinery of planning. In 2006, a geophysical survey was carried out ahead of a proposed development that would see a 67-acre site transformed into a sustainable village with 133 residential units. The survey flagged anomalies in two areas, designated 13 and 14, and subsequent test trenching by archaeologist Emer Dennehy on behalf of Margaret Gowen & Co. Ltd. confirmed the presence of an unusual buried feature. A U-shaped curvilinear ditch, 3.5 metres wide and 1.4 metres deep, was uncovered close to the walled garden of Cloghjordan House. Its fill was a dense mix of irregular limestone, animal bone, red brick, slate, and fragments of nineteenth-century glass, all apparently deposited in a single episode, suggestive of rubbish from a nearby domestic or industrial complex. Most telling was the northeast terminal of the ditch, which was lined with limestone walling and a substantial deposit of oxidised clay, clear evidence of intense and sustained burning. Dennehy concluded that the ditch was most plausibly the in-filled flue of a post-medieval industrial installation, either a blast furnace or a bakehouse. The orientation of the feature also points towards the interior of Cloghjordan House, implying the two were connected. The site was not the only discovery: the same programme of trenching identified two fulachta fiadh, ancient cooking sites associated with prehistoric burnt mound activity, as well as a ring-barrow of probable late Bronze Age or early Iron Age date. That the field around Cloughjordan contained layers of activity stretching from prehistory into the post-medieval period made the industrial remains all the more unexpected. The possible furnace, along with the ring-barrow, was excluded from the development and preserved in place.