It is the remnant of a fish palace, a term that sounds grander than the industrial reality: a fish palace was a shore-based facility for processing and pressing pilchards, once an important seasonal industry along the south-west Irish coast. The wall in question is a press beam support wall, the structure against which large wooden beams were levered to squeeze oil and brine from packed barrels of fish. That such a feature has outlasted its original coastal context and now sits within a mining landscape makes it quietly anomalous.

The surviving section stands 2.4 metres high and runs for 6 metres, with walls 0.73 metres thick. Two rows of lintelled niches are set into its east-north-east elevation, the lower row at roughly 0.45 metres above ground level and the upper at about 1.6 metres. These niches, each approximately 33 centimetres wide, 30 centimetres high, and 35 centimetres deep, would have housed the ends of the horizontal press beams, distributing the load of the press into the masonry. The foundations of a parallel wall survive 1.2 metres to the south-east, suggesting the original structure was a narrow, purposeful building rather than an open yard. The association with the Dhurode copper mines nearby is a geographical one rather than a functional one; the fish palace predates the mining activity and represents a now largely vanished pilchard industry that once operated extensively along this coastline.