Copper Mine, Claremount, Co. Galway

Copper mining in Ireland has a long history, stretching from prehistoric workings to the intensive commercial operations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when demand from Britain's industrialising economy drove prospectors into remote corners of Connacht and Munster alike. That a mine was recorded here at all suggests Claremount was once considered worth the considerable effort of extraction.

Beyond its classification as a copper mine, the specific details of this site, its working dates, the companies or individuals who held mineral rights, the scale of any operation, remain currently inaccessible in the public record. What can be said in general terms is that copper mines of the post-medieval period in the west of Ireland typically left behind spoil heaps, collapsed adits (the near-horizontal tunnels driven into hillsides to follow a seam), and traces of surface infrastructure such as buddles, the circular stone-lined pits used to separate ore from waste material by washing. Whether any of these features survive visibly at Claremount is not known from available sources.