The furnace base was small, just 0.38 metres in internal diameter, but the material packed inside told a clear story of metalworking: iron slag, lead, hazel, charcoal, and burnt stone, all the residue of a process in which ore was reduced to usable metal at high temperatures.

A stack furnace, in basic terms, is a shaft-style construction built up around a central burning chamber, with air forced in at the base to sustain the intense heat needed for smelting. That this one dates to the Iron Age places it within a period when iron technology was gradually displacing bronze across Ireland, making small-scale local smelting operations like this one genuinely significant to understanding how metalworking knowledge spread. The lead present alongside the iron slag adds a further layer of interest, suggesting the site was not limited to a single metal. Immediately to the east of the first furnace, excavators noted the traces of a possible second, hinting that this may have been a working area of some scale rather than an isolated installation. The work was carried out under excavation licence 02E0008 and reported by M. Mossop.