The entire bowl measured just over half a metre across and a quarter of a metre deep, yet the ground around it still carried the evidence of intense heat: the surrounding clay had been burned to a deep red by the sustained temperatures needed to smelt iron. What the archaeology captured, in other words, was the ghost of an industrial process, preserved not in grand structures but in scorched earth and leftover slag.

The site came to light not through a targeted investigation but as a consequence of pipeline construction. Archaeologist Emer Dennehy excavated the feature in 2002 during monitoring of topsoil-stripping along Section 3 of the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West, which ran from Goatisland in Co. Limerick to Gort in Co. Galway. The furnace itself was a bowl furnace, a simple but effective type used in bloomery iron production, where ore is smelted at high temperature to produce a raw lump of iron known as a bloom, which is then worked further by hammering. The three fills inside the bowl told a clear story: the lowest layer was charcoal-rich clay full of slag, the residue of the firing process, while the two upper layers of brown clay had filled in gradually after the furnace fell out of use. Crucially, the finished bloom and the upper charcoal layer had been removed before abandonment, suggesting the last user cleared away the useful material and simply walked away. Alongside the furnace sat a shallow oval pit, measuring roughly a metre by 38 centimetres, which contained slag but showed no sign of burning in place. Archaeologists interpreted this as a debris or fine-working pit, used in conjunction with the smelting activity.

The site itself lies approximately 200 metres south of the local road linking Finniterstown and Kiltenan South, in low-lying, flat pasture. As a pipeline corridor discovery, there is no monument to visit or marker on the ground; the topsoil-stripping that revealed the feature has long since been reinstated. What remains is the record, accessible through the excavations.ie database, where Dennehy's report gives a precise and quietly absorbing account of a small furnace that was used, stripped of its product, and left to silt over in the fields of south Limerick.