At a site in Clonee, County Meath, excavation uncovered the remains of a charcoal-making clamp, a low, covered mound of stacked wood that is slowly starved of oxygen as it burns, converting timber into the dense, controllable fuel needed for metalworking and other heat-intensive crafts. The clamp itself was modest, measuring roughly 1.2 metres by 1 metre and only 0.14 metres deep, but its compacted fills of oxidised red and orange clays, shot through with charcoal, told a clear enough story about what had happened there.

The site sits on a slight rise in otherwise level ground, and the charcoal-making activity was found clustered among pits at the eastern edge of the excavation, all of it in close proximity to a large Early Bronze Age fulacht fia mound, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by its distinctive burnt and shattered stone. The early medieval activity appears entirely separate from that much older monument; the two simply share a landscape. Radiocarbon dating placed the charcoal clamp firmly in the early Christian period: a sample of fruitstone charcoal returned a date of 588 to 655 cal. AD, while hazel charcoal recovered from a nearby isolated pit dated to between 706 and 888 cal. AD. Together, the two dates suggest this quiet corner of Meath was being used for small-scale industrial work across a considerable stretch of time during the first millennium. The excavation was carried out by D. Bayley under licence 16E0417 and formed part of a broader programme of archaeological investigation in the Clonee, Portan, and Gunnocks area.