One is a famine-era burial ground, sombre and relatively legible. The other is older, less understood, and was only found by accident: a thin scatter of charcoal and iron slag, sealed under a thick deposit of redeposited boulder clay, pointing to metalworking activity at some point before the dead were ever laid here.

The discovery came during trial trenching of the burial ground, recorded under the reference LI001-008001-, which sits roughly 120 metres south of the River Shannon. The trenching, carried out by Hodkinson in 1991, turned up the charcoal and slag deposit beneath the clay overburden. Iron slag is the glassy, porous waste material left over when iron ore is smelted or worked, and its presence alongside charcoal is a reliable signature of smithing or ironworking. No dating evidence was recovered from the deposit itself, but it was assessed as pre-dating the burials, which local tradition associates with the Famine period. The site never appeared on Ordnance Survey historic mapping, meaning it left no cartographic trace across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The documentation from the 1991 investigation, along with a physical sample of the slag, are now held at the Limerick Museum.

For anyone hoping to visit, the situation is complicated. Aerial photography captured between 2011 and 2013 through Digital Globe shows that the area had by then been developed into a small housing estate, meaning the ground above the deposit is no longer accessible in any meaningful sense. The slag sample at the Limerick Museum represents, in practical terms, the most tangible remnant of the site. It is a small thing to show for an ironworking tradition that remains entirely undated and, in many respects, still unexplained.