Yet excavations on Illaunloughan, known in Irish as Oileán Lócháin, revealed not just the remnants of craft production but something closer to a complete working sequence, from design through to casting, carried out on a patch of ground that can scarcely have felt like the centre of anything.

The island sits roughly 400 metres west-northwest of Portmagee village, in the civil parish of Killemlagh in the barony of Iveragh. Its name is uncertain in origin: one theory holds that Lócháin refers to a saint, possibly one of two figures named Lochan recorded in the Martyrology of Oengus, a text written around AD 800, with a connection perhaps reinforced by the existence of an ecclesiastical site called Killoughane at the eastern end of the Iveragh peninsula. Another reading, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books, suggests it simply means the island of the chaff. Four seasons of archaeological excavation between 1992 and 1995, led by Marshall and Walsh, uncovered approximately 70 per cent of the island. On its southern shore, within soil levels associated with a hut site, they recovered more than eighty ceramic mould fragments, a crucible, and fragments of a tuyère, the nozzle through which air is blown to raise the temperature of a forge fire. These were the physical residue of copper and bronze-alloy casting. The two-piece clay moulds, some plain and some decorated, showed that at least four objects had been made from them: a penannular brooch (an open-ended ring brooch characteristic of early medieval Ireland), a ring-brooch with fret-pattern ornamentation, and two pins, one possibly with a decorated square head. None of the finished objects turned up in the excavation, only the moulds that shaped them. More suggestive still, a sheep's shoulder blade with carved motifs was found close to the mould fragments. Marshall and Walsh interpreted this as a design sketch, evidence that the craftspeople working on Illaunloughan were not simply executing patterns brought from elsewhere but were working out their decorative schemes on the island itself.