The platform measures roughly eight and a half metres north to south and eight metres east to west, cut into the hillside to the south to a depth of about a metre, and built up on the northern edge to a height of around half a metre. Along that northern scarp, lumps of charcoal remain visible, dark remnants of a process that once fed a furnace several kilometres away.

The platform is what surveyors classify as a charcoal-making site, a place where timber was carefully stacked, covered with turf or earth to restrict airflow, and slowly burned to produce the dense, carbon-rich fuel that early iron smelting required. The level area would have been essential: a flat surface allowed the charcoal hearth, sometimes called a pitstead, to be built and managed with some control. This particular site was operating in the early eighteenth century, producing charcoal to supply an iron smelter at Lauragh Upper, a few miles to the east along the Beara Peninsula. The iron industry in this part of Kerry drew on the oak woodlands that once covered the valley slopes, and sites like this one were the unglamorous but necessary first link in that chain, converting raw timber into a fuel dense enough to reach the temperatures needed for smelting.