Cornish engine houses were purpose-built structures that once housed large steam-powered beam engines, used primarily for pumping water out of flooded mine workings, and their presence here signals the scale of organised extraction that took place across centuries. What makes this site particularly arresting is the sheer range of what was pulled from the ground: sulphur, calamine (a zinc ore), lead, silver, copper, and zinc, extracted through operations that span, at minimum, from the early seventeenth century through to the twentieth.

The documentary history of mining here is genuinely tangled. A historian named Gleeson, writing in 1937, argued that medieval references to mining in Tipperary, including a petition to the Irish exchequer dated 1303, pointed to this very area. A later scholar, Cowman, writing in 1988, pushed back on this, noting that those early references name no specific location and could apply to mines anywhere in the county. What is not in dispute is the first firm record: in 1631, a Messrs Whitmore and Webb were granted mining rights at the site then known as Knockaunderrick. The Civil Survey of the mid-seventeenth century refers to the 'silver mines of Knockan Idirke' in the townlands of Ballygowen and Erenagh, and on the north slope of that same hill, close to the ruins of Dunally Castle, there is evidence of an early mine that may date to that same seventeenth-century period. A large spoil heap outside its entrance contains visible copper ore, and grass-covered wall-footings some 500 metres to the north may be the remnants of a settlement where miners once lived. This early working may be the very site described in a patent issued by King Charles I as the 'Royal mines of Dunaille or Knockanderry'. The entrance to the mine was waterlogged when it was last examined, and the question of whether any extraction happened here in prehistoric times remains open, with no physical evidence yet found to confirm it.