The remains form a roughly circular enclosure about 3.5 metres across, with an earthen and stone bank still standing close to a metre high on its interior face. Scattered across the ground at the foot of the slope to the west, fragments of slag and vitrified stone, the waste products of the smelting process, sit quietly in the soil. A smelting chamber like this would have been charged, that is, loaded with iron ore and fuel, from the higher ground to the east, while the molten waste ran downhill and away. An old pier and wall along the tidal estuary to the west suggest the site once sat within a working industrial landscape, connected to water transport in a way that would have made good commercial sense.

The historical identity of the site rests on a tentative but intriguing connection. The scholar McCracken, writing in 1957, recorded an ironworks in the Aghadown area of County Cork that was operated by a family called the Whites, apparently during the second half of the seventeenth century. No local memory of ironworks has survived in Aghadown itself, which has led to the suggestion that the Leighcloon site is precisely what McCracken was describing. The Whites were among a number of entrepreneurial families, often of planter or merchant background, who established small-scale iron industries in Munster during this period, typically exploiting local woodland for charcoal and waterways for transport. The connection remains unconfirmed, but the physical evidence at Leighcloon, the chamber, the slag, the elevated charging area, is consistent with that kind of small industrial operation.