These were not graves, not postholes, not the usual agricultural disturbances that turn up in developer-led excavations. They were the residue of metalworking, the scorched and blackened pockets left behind when someone, long ago, was smelting or processing metal in the townland of Benedin.

The pits varied considerably in size, ranging from as little as 0.2 metres in diameter up to 0.8 by 0.5 metres, with a maximum depth of 0.4 metres. Small features, in other words, but concentrated and consistent enough to suggest deliberate, repeated activity in the same area. The presence of metal slag is the telling detail. Slag is the glassy or stony waste that separates out during smelting, and finding it alongside burnt clay and charcoal points to some form of on-site metalworking rather than casual burning or domestic refuse. The excavator, McConway, noted that these pits closely resembled a separate group of collection pits recorded elsewhere in the same townland, and that the proximity and similarity between the two groups raises the possibility of a Bronze Age date, a period when copper and bronze production was spreading across Ireland and small-scale smelting sites were appearing in the landscape.