At the confluence of a small south-to-north stream and the east-west Araglin River in County Waterford, the remains of a blast furnace sit largely unannounced in the landscape. A blast furnace was the industrial heart of early iron production, a stone structure into which iron ore, charcoal, and limestone were loaded from above, with bellows forcing air through to generate the intense heat needed to smelt the ore below. This one, still standing to a height of 1.55 metres with a width of 4.1 metres, retains its charging area and two outlets. Nearby lie the foundations of a forge measuring roughly ten metres by nine, and to the east, what appear to be tailing tips, the spoil heaps left over from the ironworking process.

The story of how an industrial operation came to be established at this quiet riverine spot reaches back to Sir Walter Raleigh, who acquired extensive estates across east Cork and west Waterford and was the first to recognise the iron-making potential of the region. When Sir Richard Boyle, who would later become the first Earl of Cork, purchased the Raleigh estates in 1604, he inherited that ambition and carried it further. An ironworks and blast furnace were established at Knockbaun in 1642 by one of Boyle's sons, making it part of a broader network of industrial enterprise the family pursued across this corner of Munster. Around 1741 new works were constructed on the site, this time oriented towards the production of bar iron, a more refined product made by working the smelted metal further to remove impurities. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the works appear to have fallen into disuse, and what survives today probably reflects that mid-eighteenth-century phase of activity rather than the original seventeenth-century construction.