The working is roughly four metres deep and barely tall enough to stand in, its hanging wall clearing just over a metre at its highest interior point. The wall-rock is broken rather than smoothed, and the fracture pattern near the entrance hints at iron tools rather than the fire-setting technique, in which fire was used to crack rock faces, that characterises the confirmed prehistoric mines elsewhere on the mountain. That smooth, concave profile left by fire-setting is conspicuously absent here, and no stone mauls, the rounded cobbles used as hammers by Bronze Age miners, were found in the rubble spread across the slope outside.

Mount Gabriel is one of the most significant early mining landscapes in Europe. The mountain's Bronze Age workings, dating broadly to the period around 1500 BC, represent some of the oldest known copper mines in Ireland and were the subject of detailed fieldwork by archaeologist William O'Brien, whose 1994 monograph brought the complex to wider scholarly attention. This particular working sits roughly six metres north of another mine on the same scarp and may be among the sites recorded by T.J. Duffy in unpublished Geological Survey field sheets from 1929, and later noted by J.S. Jackson in a 1968 study of the mountain's Bronze Age mines. When O'Brien examined it in 1984, he found mineralised calcareous conglomerates in the open-cut to the east and a deposit of sticky clay-like sediment at the back wall, but no primary mine sediments that might confirm a prehistoric date. The loose stone spread outside appeared modern, possibly connected to activity within the past two hundred years.

The ambiguity is part of what makes the site worth knowing about. It sits within a protected complex, designated a National Monument in State care, and its unresolved character is a reminder that even a well-studied landscape can hold workings that refuse to be neatly categorised. The entrance is small and the interior modest, but the questions it raises about who cut it, and when, are considerably larger.