Neither pit was dramatic in scale. The larger measured roughly 2.5 metres in length and only 0.15 metres deep, filled with a reddish-purple, compact, silty clay flecked here and there with charcoal. The smaller was shallower still. Both contained iron slag-like material, the kind of industrial waste left behind when ore is processed into usable metal.

What makes these features interesting is not their size but their implication. Iron panning refers to a natural concentration of iron compounds in the soil, and the surrounding area showed a pronounced prevalence of it, suggesting the landscape itself supplied the raw material. The excavator proposed that these pits were associated with the early extraction or processing of that material, a localised, perhaps small-scale, episode of iron production. No burning was detected within the pits themselves, meaning whatever heat-intensive work was involved happened elsewhere, or that these features served a different stage of the process. The finds were recorded in the context of Michael Connolly's doctoral research on prehistoric settlement in the Lee Valley near Tralee, completed at University College Cork in 2008, which placed them within a broader attempt to understand how early communities organised themselves across the Kerry landscape.

The features came to light only because of the careful monitoring that accompanied the N21 road improvement scheme, the kind of watching brief that turns an infrastructure project into an inadvertent archaeological survey. Without that oversight, the pits would most likely have been removed without record, their reddish fill indistinguishable from the surrounding subsoil to any eye not trained to look.