Copper mines of this kind were worked at various points from the Bronze Age onwards, though the most intensive period of activity in Ireland generally fell between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, when demand from industrialising Britain drew prospectors and speculators into remote corners of Connacht in search of viable ore deposits.

Copper mining in the west of Ireland rarely produced the sustained output of larger operations elsewhere, but it left a particular kind of mark on the landscape: collapsed adits, spoil heaps stained with the blue-green bloom of copper oxide, and the occasional ruined engine house or processing structure. Barratleva is a small townland, and the mine recorded there represents the kind of localised workings that were common enough in Galway and Mayo during the nineteenth century, often opened with some ambition and quietly abandoned when the seam thinned or the economics turned unfavourable. The detail of who worked it, when, and with what result has not yet been fully documented in the public record.