The site at Sallymount, roughly 1.5 kilometres south-east of the River Shannon, would almost certainly have remained unknown had a road not been built across the landscape. It is the kind of place whose significance lies entirely underground, or rather, in what was once underground and has since been carefully sieved and dated.

The site came to light in 2006 when archaeologist Tracy Collins carried out test trenching ahead of the construction of the Southern Limerick Ring-Road, working under Ministerial Direction Order A026/171. What emerged was subsequently excavated by Aidan Harte as part of a broader investigation known as Gortnalahagh Site 1. The physical remains were modest in scale: a charcoal-rich pit measuring roughly 0.9 metres by 0.7 metres and just 0.15 metres deep, accompanied by two hearths. Radiocarbon dating confirmed the site was medieval in date. Harte interpreted the pit as a charcoal pit kiln, a type of structure used to slowly burn wood in a low-oxygen environment to produce charcoal for metalworking or other fuel-intensive crafts. One of the two hearths appears to have been formed from material displaced from the kiln itself, while the other was interpreted as a domestic hearth, used by the workers tending the process. That second hearth is a quietly human detail: someone sat beside it, waiting, while the kiln did its slow work.

There is no monument to visit here in any conventional sense. The excavated features have long since been recorded and the road construction proceeded above them. What remains is the documentary record, principally Harte's 2011 report, which preserves the measurements, the stratigraphy, and the radiocarbon results. For anyone interested in medieval rural industry, the site serves as a reminder of how much activity once occurred in ordinary agricultural ground, and how thoroughly it can vanish without the intervention of development-led archaeology. The area around Sallymount is accessible farmland near the Shannon, but the site itself is not marked or signposted, and the interest lies in the archive rather than in anything visible on the surface.