Nothing is visible there now, yet the Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1846 as a "site of Iron Works" and marked an old mill race, roughly 180 metres long, running from the river to the works. The fact that the site was already described in those terms by the mid-nineteenth century suggests its industrial life had ended well before cartographers arrived to record its outline.

The ironworks is closely associated with Sir William Petty, the seventeenth-century physician, surveyor, and landowner whose name is threaded through the economic history of Kerry. Petty's unpublished papers mention a forge at Gortalinny, south of the river Roughty, and Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, credited Petty directly with establishing iron-smelting works on the east bank of the Sheen, describing a walled enclosure as their remains. Petty was an enthusiastic improver who held vast tracts of Munster land following the Cromwellian settlement, and the use of local rivers to drive industrial machinery was a natural extension of that ambition. A separate source, Eileen McCracken's work on Irish woodland industries, records a charcoal-burning ironworks at Gortalinny established by one William Orpen after 1689, which may point to the original enterprise continuing under new management into the later seventeenth century. Charcoal-burning ironworks of this period were voracious consumers of timber, and their spread across Munster and Connacht in the 1600s is well documented as a factor in the dramatic reduction of Ireland's native woodlands. The mill race itself, an artificial channel dug to divert water and power the machinery, is a detail that makes the former scale of the operation easier to picture, even if the ground now gives nothing away.