It is not a dramatic monument, and it would be easy to walk past without registering what it is. But the flatness itself is the point: the platform was deliberately constructed, cut into the slope and held in place by a drystone retaining wall of up to four courses, creating a stable surface on which wood could be slowly burned down into charcoal. Rather than using a pit kiln, where material is combusted below ground level, the people who worked here used a mound method, piling timber and covering it to control the burn above the surface of the platform.

The site is one of 86 such charcoal production sites recorded across the area by a researcher named Healy in 1972, who designated this particular example platform 78. Healy carried out the first excavation, opening two L-shaped trenches. Decades later, in 2009, a team from the UCD School of Archaeology returned to the site as part of a training fieldwork programme, and their more detailed investigation produced a clearer picture of the platform's sub-rectangular shape, measuring 8m east to west and 5m north to south. Radiocarbon dating of a charcoal sample gave two date ranges: AD 1730 to 1810, and AD 1930 to 1960. The gap between those two periods is striking. It suggests the site was in use during the eighteenth century, likely connected to the ironworking and fuel industries that drew heavily on managed woodland across Wicklow at that time, and then returned to, or perhaps simply disturbed, in the mid-twentieth century. Whether those two episodes represent continuous woodland craft practice or something more incidental is not entirely clear from the evidence recovered.