That colouration is the giveaway: the green is malachite, the oxidised residue of copper ore, and it marks these unremarkable-looking heaps as the spoil of nineteenth-century mining activity that never amounted to very much.

The workings here are modest by any measure. Two shallow gullies were cut into the hillside, from which quartz rock was extracted in the hope of recovering workable copper. The ore-bearing stone was separated out and left in spoil heaps nearby; three of these mounds survive, the largest measuring roughly twelve metres long, six metres wide, and a metre and a half high. This was small-scale, speculative work, characteristic of the wave of copper prospecting that swept across the uplands of Kerry and Cork during the nineteenth century, when rising demand for the metal and relatively accessible geology encouraged landowners and speculators to sink modest excavations across the region. Many such ventures produced little beyond these quiet green-stained reminders on hillsides that have long since returned to rough grazing.