They are, in fact, the physical traces of an industrial process that once supplied charcoal to a landscape more often associated with monks and manuscripts. Each platform, roughly nine metres by six, would have served as a pitstead, a levelled working surface on which a carefully stacked mound of timber was covered with turf or earth and allowed to smoulder slowly over several days. The resulting charcoal was lighter, more energy-dense than raw wood, and essential for smelting and metalworking.

At least seventy-five of these platforms have been identified at irregular intervals along the northern and southern sides of the Upper Lake and to the west and south-west of Reefert Church, one of the small Romanesque ruins that give the Glendalough valley its other name, Sevenchurches. An additional forty similar platforms were recorded separately, bringing the total count documented across two surveys to well over a hundred. The references place the observations in 1940 and the early 1970s, suggesting that the features were already a recognised part of the valley's industrial archaeology by the mid-twentieth century. Whether the charcoal production served the famous monastic settlement directly, or a later phase of activity in the same landscape, the notes do not say, but the proximity to Reefert Church and the sheer number of platforms point to an operation of some scale rather than occasional woodland management.