Among them is a levelled earthen platform, roughly five metres long and three and a half metres wide, where charcoal was once produced by stacking and slowly burning timber under a covering of earth or turf to restrict oxygen. The platform itself is the tell-tale feature: charcoal-makers, or colliers, required a flat, stable surface on which to build their carefully managed burns, and where the natural ground was sloped, they cut and built up terraces to create one.

This particular platform is one of 86 such sites recorded across the area by Healy in 1972, who catalogued it as platform 76. The concentration alone suggests an organised and sustained operation rather than any casual or occasional activity. In 2009, the UCD School of Archaeology selected this platform and two nearby counterparts for test excavation as part of its student training fieldwork programme. The small test pit sunk into this monument recovered traces of charcoal, a modest but direct confirmation that the platform was indeed used for production rather than some other purpose. Though a test pit of this scale leaves most of a site undisturbed, even the small sample recovered connects the landscape back to the people who worked it, tending slow smouldering heaps of wood over days at a time, producing the fuel that smelting and smithing depended upon.