During excavation in 2007, archaeologists uncovered a furnace, a pit whose sides had been subjected to intense, sustained heat, with its fills packed with charcoal and slag, the glassy, stony residue left over from smelting or metalworking. Concentrations of slag were particularly heavy near the rim, suggesting repeated use and the kind of industrial activity that would have been entirely ordinary in its day, and is now almost invisible in the landscape.

The site came to light not through a dedicated archaeological survey but as a consequence of road construction. Advance excavations carried out ahead of the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road improvement scheme, under licence number E3616, brought this corner of Danesfort under scrutiny. What emerged was a furnace set into a valley floor overlooking a small stream, roughly ten metres to the north-west of a ring-ditch associated with a flat cemetery, that is, a burial ground with no visible surface mounding, the graves lying level with the surrounding ground. The proximity of a working furnace to a place of burial is not unusual in early Irish contexts, where the boundaries between the domestic, the industrial, and the funerary were often drawn quite differently than we might expect today. The excavation findings were subsequently published by Jennings in 2009 and 2010.