The cruciform depression, its shaft open at the base to receive the timber beams that once held the anvil upright, is among the more evocative physical traces of late medieval industry to have emerged from an Irish urban excavation. The hall itself belonged to an earlier, grander phase of the site's life, but by the post-medieval period it had been repurposed entirely, its stone walls enclosing a working smeltery rather than any domestic or administrative function.

The excavations, drawing on work published by Delany in 2004, identified two distinct phases of ironworking activity within the hall. The earlier phase left behind four pits cut into medieval gravel deposits, more than fifty stake-holes, and a dense concentration of iron slag at the base of at least one pit, consistent with use as a furnace pit in which wrought iron was produced directly from ore on a small scale. The stake-holes clustered near the hall's southern doorway and around its central stone column may have supported temporary working structures, canopies, or worktops, though no clear plan emerged from their arrangement. The second phase showed a more developed operation: clay-and-stone floors, wooden objects, stained stones bearing iron filings between them suggesting a surface for hammering molten metal, and the large cruciform anvil base in the northern part of the hall. The head and arms of the anvil's impression measured roughly 0.9 metres by 0.55 metres, while the shaft extended to 1.75 metres. A collapsed stone structure nearby may represent the remains of a furnace. Occasional clay-pipe stem fragments in the upper deposits hint at activity continuing into the early seventeenth century, though the excavator considered their absence elsewhere on the site to be more telling, placing the smelting works more confidently in the sixteenth century. The broader excavation also recovered the eastern corner of a thirteenth-century castle, a limekiln, a high medieval hall, and over eleven thousand artefacts and environmental samples across the two excavation areas.