Somewhere beneath a stretch of coniferous forest on a gentle south-east-facing slope in County Waterford, four mine shafts lie closed and largely forgotten, their mouths sealed over by time and tree root. The streams that run nearby feed into the Licky River, and just across in the townland of Lyre, a series of oval earthen mounds, some reaching thirty metres in length and three metres in height, sit quietly in the landscape. These are likely slag heaps, the compacted waste of metal extraction, and they hint at an industrial history that most visitors to this quiet corner of Waterford would never suspect.

The mines were first worked under the ownership of Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan courtier and adventurer who held extensive lands in Munster during the late sixteenth century. They later passed to Sir Richard Boyle, the Earl of Cork, one of the most powerful landowners in early seventeenth-century Ireland, a man who accumulated wealth and property on a remarkable scale. That accumulation was interrupted by the 1641 Rebellion, a widespread and violent uprising against English settler landowners across Ireland, and the workings at Drumslig were destroyed in the course of it. The shafts were then left untouched for the better part of two centuries, before being reopened sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, a period when industrial interest in Irish mineral resources was reviving across the country. The oval mounds in Lyre most likely date from this later phase of activity. The four original shafts were recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which gives some measure of how well-established, and then how thoroughly abandoned, the site had become by the time the surveyors passed through.