There is nothing to see from the surface, no earthwork, no obvious depression, and the site never appeared on any Ordnance Survey historic mapping. What lies beneath, however, tells a different story: ironworking kilns, burnt deposits, and the debris of metalwork, all quietly preserved in well-drained ground roughly thirty metres from the castle's base.

The site came to light during archaeological testing carried out in 2004 under licence number 04E1476, with the results published by Collins. Six narrow trenches, each between ten and twenty metres long and one and a half metres wide, were cut across the area, and the picture that emerged was surprisingly dense. Excavators found linear features, post-holes, and concentrated areas of burning, along with three possible ironworking kilns. The finds included iron slag, charcoal, and animal bone. Slag is the glassy, often lumpy waste material left over after smelting iron from ore, and its presence alongside a furnace bottom and those burning concentrations is fairly persuasive evidence that metal was being worked here, not merely stored or processed in some other way. Some of the larger linear cuts may represent the ditches of enclosures on the level ground at the base of the castle rock, and given how many features were identified, it seems likely that at least part of this activity was medieval, contemporary with the period when Carrigogunnel Castle itself was occupied.

The site sits in ordinary farmland and is not formally accessible or marked for visitors. Carrigogunnel Castle, a short distance to the south-west, is the more visible destination in the area and offers a sense of the elevated volcanic outcrop that would have dominated this whole landscape. Those interested in the metalworking site itself should note that its archaeology lies entirely below ground level; there is nothing visible on the surface. The value here is in knowing the context, that the level ground at the castle's foot was not simply empty space, but a place where people worked iron, maintained enclosures, and went about the practical business of medieval life.