These are the physical remains of charcoal production, an industry that leaves behind a distinctive signature: levelled, roughly oval terraces cut into hillsides where the ground would otherwise slope away. Known as pitstead or hearth platforms, they mark the spots where charcoal burners, or colliers, stacked and slowly combusted timber under a covering of earth and turf, a process that could take several days of careful tending to produce the dense, hot-burning fuel that smelting and ironworking required.

At Lugduff in County Wicklow, the scale of the operation is striking. Researchers recorded at least 75 of these platforms on the northern and southern sides of the Upper Lake and to the west and south-west of Reefert Church, each measuring roughly 9 metres by 6 metres. A further 40 similar platforms were noted in related survey work. The site was documented by Ua Riain in 1940 and subsequently by Healy in 1972, placing formal awareness of it in the mid-twentieth century, though the platforms themselves belong to an earlier period of industrial activity. The Wicklow uplands were extensively exploited for iron production from at least the early modern period, and the valley's woodlands would have supplied the raw material for charcoal in considerable quantities. Reefert Church, a ruined Romanesque structure associated with the early monastic settlement of Glendalough, provides a useful landmark for orienting the distribution of the platforms, most of which cluster to its west and south-west.