What has emerged is an irregular, blackened spread of stones measuring roughly five metres by three, dense with iron slag, vitreous clay, and fragments of bone. These are not the tidy leftovers of a smithy but the messier evidence of smelting, the more intensive process by which raw iron ore is reduced using intense heat, forced air, and fuel.

The objects recovered from the site give a clearer sense of the work that once took place here. Among them are fragments of tuyères, the ceramic nozzles through which bellows forced air into the furnace to raise temperatures high enough to work iron, along with scraps of sheet iron. These have been deposited with the National Museum of Ireland. A second concentration of large iron slag lumps lies about seventeen metres to the south-east of the main spread, and may represent a separate but related smelting area. The two sites together suggest that metalworking on Beginish was not a casual or incidental activity. Exactly when this work was carried out is not recorded in what has been published so far, though the island has early medieval associations more broadly, and ironworking of this kind fits comfortably within that period in Ireland, when island and coastal communities often supported surprisingly specialised craft production.