They are low, cramped, and waterlogged, none of them tall enough to stand in, and the largest is barely three metres deep. Yet the smooth, concave profile of the walls tells a precise story: these were not cut by drill or powder blast, but by fire-setting, the oldest known method of hard-rock mining, in which fire was lit against the rock face to expand and fracture it before the loosened material was worked away by hand. Outside the openings, to the east and north-east, denuded spoil dumps spread across an area of roughly twenty-two metres east to west and nineteen metres north to south, and scattered among them are stone mauls of the type associated with the prehistoric copper mines at Mount Gabriel, a site on the Mizen Peninsula that was worked during the Bronze Age.

Researcher William O'Brien documented the site in 1987, and the combination of fire-set technique and Mount Gabriel-type stone hammers, which are essentially large rounded beach cobbles used to pound ore-bearing rock, points strongly towards prehistoric activity, probably Bronze Age in date, though the waterlogged infill inside the workings has not been excavated and no formal dating has been carried out. What adds a particular texture to the place is a local tradition attaching the workings to the "Danes", a catch-all folk memory applied across Ireland to ancient structures whose origins had been forgotten. This was a common way of accounting for things that seemed inexplicably old, attributing them to some vaguely imagined foreign people rather than to local ancestors. Here on a remote mountain bog, that tradition quietly signals that these openings in the rock were already mysterious to the communities living around them long before anyone thought to examine them archaeologically.

The site sits in blanket bog at a considerable elevation, which means the ground is soft and the approach is likely to be wet underfoot regardless of season. The workings themselves are small enough to overlook easily, being set into the base of a low outcrop rather than forming any prominent feature on the landscape, and the spoil dumps, though measurable in extent, are described as denuded, meaning they no longer rise to any great height above the surrounding ground.