Partly infilled vertical shafts break the surface, and spoil heaps from centuries of extraction still disturb the lakeshore terrain. This is the site of a copper mining operation that ran, in at least six distinct phases, from around 1749 to 1818, spread across three separate locations close to the water's edge.

The mining here unfolded over nearly seventy years, which is a long enough span to suggest both the difficulty of the work and the persistent belief that something worthwhile lay beneath. Three stone buildings survive in the central mine area. One is identified with reasonable confidence as a powder magazine, the secure store where blasting materials would have been kept well away from the workforce during active operations. A second is a small, single-storey stone house whose original purpose is no longer clear. The third, a larger structure, appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as an "Old Furnace", though what exactly was processed there, and whether it served a smelting or assaying function, has not been established. The gap between the OS label and the archaeological reality is itself telling; the site accumulated meanings and uses across its working life that no single name fully captures.

The shafts and spoil deposits are visible today, sitting quietly within what is now the Killarney National Park, where the industrial past of the lakeshore tends to be overshadowed by the landscape around it. The ruins of the stone buildings remain in the central mine area, close enough to the water that the relationship between the extraction site and the lake, whether for transport, drainage, or processing, would have been a practical daily reality for everyone who worked there.