It is a floor, roughly four metres by two and a half, made largely of its own debris: a hard-packed accumulation of smithying scales, the tiny flakes of iron that fly off when a hammer meets hot metal on an anvil. That layer, dense and unmistakable once you know what it is, was what stopped excavators in their tracks when topsoil-stripping for the N8 Glanmire-Watergrasshill Bypass uncovered the site in 2001. The floor itself had functioned as a kind of slow archive, recording the smith's movements across the space through the quiet accumulation of his work.

Excavation that year, led by Cotter, revealed that the floor divided into two functional zones. The northern half held a charcoal-enriched silt layer, most likely the location of the smith's fire. The southern half bore the thickest concentration of metal scales, suggesting the anvil stood there. Stake-holes beneath both layers probably marked the positions of the structures that held the fire, the bellows, and associated fittings. A pit on the western side may have been where the anvil was set, with disturbance in the pit possibly caused by its eventual removal. The eastern edge of the floor was unusually straight and regular, hinting at a wall that has since left no other trace. Running northward from the site, a metalled pathway some twenty metres long connected the smithy to the wider world, and about five metres to the west, two parallel ditches marked the course of a medieval road. Artefactual evidence places the smithy in use from the late seventeenth into the eighteenth century, and it appears to have been one part of a larger late or post-medieval settlement, with domestic structures excavated roughly eighty metres to the north.

The site no longer exists as a visible feature in the landscape; it was uncovered only because road construction stripped away the pasture above it. What the excavation captured was a working space that had been sealed in place, its internal logic intact enough to reconstruct where a man stood, where he set his fire, and where he eventually pulled out the anvil and left.