The spot itself is easy to overlook now, a marginal strip on the south-western shore, but the archaeological evidence recovered there speaks to a small, purposeful industrial operation that sat right at the tidal boundary.

The site came to light during excavation carried out ahead of new bridge construction. Alongside two corn-drying kilns, a corn-drying kiln being a stone or clay-lined feature used to dry harvested grain before milling, the excavators uncovered a metalworking area comprising two small hearths and a spread of fire-hardened clay and ash extending eastward from one of them. The work being done here was not primary smelting; very little slag was recovered, which points instead to the finishing of objects, the refining, shaping, or polishing of items already partly formed elsewhere. Oak was the main fuel used in the hearths. A radiocarbon date obtained from a piece of willow charcoal places the activity somewhere between AD 1044 and 1218, a period that spans the late Gaelic-Irish era and the early decades of the Anglo-Norman presence in Ireland. The combination of metalworking and grain-drying in the same small area suggests a working site of some local economic importance, tucked into an estuarine landscape that would have been well connected by water to the wider region.