The local tradition, recorded by Clancy and Forde in 1980, holds that pikes were manufactured here for the 1798 rebellion, the United Irishmen's attempt to break British rule with the support of revolutionary France. Pikes were the weapon of the ordinary insurgent, cheap to produce and requiring no gunpowder, and forges in remote locations would have been well suited to producing them quietly.

The building itself is two-chambered, with internal dimensions of roughly 6.4 metres by 4 metres, and is thought to date from the 18th century. Vitrified material found within it, that is, material fused by intense heat into a glassy substance, points clearly to ironworking. The forge sits inside a disused quarry on a south-facing bank of a small east-west stream, about 200 metres from where that stream meets Lough Allen at a bay known locally as Tommy Simpson's Lake. Slag, the stony waste left over from smelting, was used to build up a level working platform roughly 25 metres in diameter inside the quarry. It is a practical, utilitarian arrangement, tucked into a north-facing slope and screened by the quarry walls, the kind of place where work could be done without drawing much attention.

The site is heavily overgrown, and the quarry opening faces north toward the lakeshore. Visitors with an interest in industrial archaeology or the 1798 period should expect a ruin rather than a preserved structure, but the slag platform and the vitrified traces within the walls give the place a quiet material weight that no amount of greenery quite obscures.