The single surviving reference to it dates to 1508, recorded by Clarke in a study of the city's early industrial and commercial life. It is the kind of detail that slips easily past notice, a brief notation in a footnote, and yet it opens a small window onto a working city that most accounts of the period leave largely unlit. Brass production in this era involved smelting copper with calamine, a zinc-bearing ore, at high temperatures, and the presence of such a furnace implies not just a craftsman at work but a supply chain, a clientele, and a neighbourhood accustomed to the noise and heat of metalworking.

The year 1508 places this furnace in the late medieval period, when Dublin was a walled Anglo-Irish town of modest but real commercial complexity. The south city area, lying outside or along the margins of the old walls, was where much of the messier and more hazardous trades tended to concentrate, kept at a distance from civic and ecclesiastical centres. Brass was a valuable material, used for ecclesiastical fittings, domestic vessels, and decorative work, and a local furnace would have served both the city's own demand and possibly a wider regional market. Clarke's note offers no owner, no street, and no further detail. The furnace is, in the language of archaeology, not precisely located.

There is, practically speaking, nothing to visit. No structure survives, no commemorative marker is known, and the exact site has not been established by excavation or documentary evidence. What remains is the record itself, and the question it leaves open about which part of the south city once carried the smell of hot metal and charcoal. For anyone walking the older streets between the Liffey and the Coombe, or along the quays near Winetavern Street, the furnace is worth holding in mind as a reminder that the medieval city was also an industrial one, full of trades that have left little trace above ground.