On a quiet plateau beside Rathmoylan church in County Waterford, the ground once held the physical remains of metalworking activity, middens, and the kind of domestic debris that rarely survives long once agricultural improvement takes hold. What makes this site unusual is not what remains but what was briefly glimpsed before it disappeared: around 1983, earthworks here were levelled, and in the process several middens came to light alongside fragments of slag and an object that may have been a spearhead. Slag is the glassy, porous waste left over from smelting or forging metal, and its presence is one of the clearest indicators archaeologists have that metal was being worked at a location. The possible spearhead, if that is indeed what it was, adds a sharper suggestion of what kind of metalwork was being carried out.

The site sits in pasture on a plateau, with an east-west stream running roughly thirty metres to the north, and it clusters around the area of Rathmoylan church. The association between early churches and nearby craft activity is well attested in Ireland; ecclesiastical sites often served as focal points for skilled trades as well as religious life. The earthworks that once defined the site are now gone, removed during farm work, but before they vanished they were recorded as part of the Old Waterford Society Survey, published in Decies in 1983. One physical remnant does survive: the base of a pot quern, a type of rotary hand-mill used for grinding grain, was recovered from the site and is kept at a nearby farmhouse. It is a modest object, but it places ordinary domestic life alongside the metalworking evidence, suggesting a settlement of some kind rather than an isolated industrial feature.