Enclosed by a low earthen bank, grass-covered and barely a third of a metre high, the site looks from a distance like little more than a slight irregularity in the hill pasture. But where rabbits have been burrowing, and where a sheep path cuts across the north-western edge, lumps of charcoal still work their way to the surface, dark and incongruous against the peaty soil.

Charcoal-making platforms of this kind were typically constructed by piling and burning timber under a covering of earth and turf, a slow smothering process that drove off moisture and volatile compounds to leave a concentrated fuel. This particular platform was in use in the early eighteenth century, producing charcoal not for domestic heating but for an iron smelter at Lauragh Upper, a few kilometres away. Iron smelting in this period was enormously fuel-hungry, and smelters across Ireland depended on networks of woodland and hillside burning sites to keep their furnaces running. The association between the two sites, the platform on the hill and the smelter below, is a small but legible fragment of that industrial geography. Roughly 110 metres to the west of the charcoal platform, a hut site survives, almost certainly the remains of a shelter used by the workers who tended the burns.