The site in Dollas Lower appeared on no Ordnance Survey historic map, left no visible trace on aerial photography taken years after its excavation, and would almost certainly have remained entirely unknown had it not been for the large-scale topsoil-stripping carried out during construction of the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West in the early 2000s. That kind of accidental discovery is not unusual in Irish infrastructure archaeology, but what emerged here was a compact and coherent little picture of metal production, preserved in a cluster of four features no wider than a modest garden shed.

Archaeologists Marie Dowling and Kate Taylor excavated the site in 2002 under Licence No. 02E0631, having first identified it as feature BGE 3/67/5 during pipeline works. What they found were two pits, a post-hole, and a bowl furnace, all appearing to belong to the same phase of activity. A bowl furnace is essentially a small, pit-like structure dug into the ground and used to smelt metal by directing a forced air supply into the base of the fire; this one measured just 0.4 metres by 0.32 metres and was 0.3 metres deep, yet its primary fill contained charcoal and iron slag, and the surrounding clay showed the scorching of in situ burning. The larger of the two pits, measuring 0.95 metres by 0.85 metres, held slag and an intriguing quantity of white shell fragments, and was likely used to dispose of waste from the furnace. The post-hole, too, contained slag and charcoal. The period of all this activity remains uncertain; no immediately datable artefacts were recovered, and the excavation report noted that radiocarbon dating of the charcoal and analysis of the slag itself would be needed to assign the site to any particular era.

There is nothing to see at Dollas Lower today. The monument was fully excavated, and subsequent aerial photography, including images from 2005 to 2012 and again in 2018, shows no surface trace whatsoever. The site sits roughly 25 metres west of the townland boundary with Dollas, on pasture land on a steep slope. For anyone interested in the archaeology of early Irish metalworking, the significance lies not in visiting the spot itself but in understanding what the pipeline programme, documented in Grogan et al. (2007), revealed about how widely such small-scale industrial activity was distributed across the Irish countryside, often in places that left no mark on any map.