On a hillside in County Waterford, within the earthworks of an enclosure that may once have served a very different purpose, someone was once producing iron on a considerable scale. The site sits at the crest of an east-facing slope inside a trivallate enclosure, meaning a ringwork defended by three concentric banks and ditches, a form more commonly associated with early ecclesiastical or high-status settlement. That the same ground was later put to industrial use is what makes it quietly interesting.

When M.J. Bowman excavated the site in 1940, the finds were striking in their volume. Between 100 and 150 kilograms of iron material came out of the ground, accompanied by the remains of a furnace and fragments of what appears to be a tuyere, the clay or ceramic nozzle through which a bellows would have forced air into a smelting furnace to raise its temperature. Together, these point to a sustained episode of iron working rather than a casual or incidental use of the site. Researcher Curtin, writing in 2015, placed this activity in the early modern period, though the precise date remains uncertain. The enclosure itself had earlier been identified by Power in 1952 as a possible early church site, which raises the question of what sequence of uses the place passed through before the ironworkers arrived. Whether the ecclesiastical suggestion is correct or not, the landscape context adds a layer of complexity to what the earthworks might represent across the centuries.