Two furnaces packed with charcoal and slag were uncovered near the old street frontage, along with several hearth bottoms, the solidified pools of waste that form at the base of a working furnace, and a scatter of iron debris. The find is quietly telling. It places industrial metalworking not on the margins of a medieval settlement but right at its commercial edge, where goods and traffic would have passed daily.

The ironworking at Hoop's-Lot appears to have a complicated relationship with the structures around it. The evidence suggests it may actually pre-date the bridge it sits beside, which would push the activity back to a period before the crossing was even established. Three sherds of pottery recovered from layers overlying the hearths date to the thirteenth century, offering at least a rough chronological anchor. There is also a possibility that the site was connected to a tower-house, the kind of fortified stone residence common in late medieval Ireland, which stood on an island in the adjacent river. Whether the forge served that structure, the wider settlement, or both is not certain. A second phase of excavation in 2001 added further detail, uncovering hearths alongside paved and metalled, that is, deliberately surfaced and compacted, ground surfaces consistent with a late medieval workshop or smithy, which may represent a continuation or expansion of the same industrial activity found earlier.