The entrance is barely half a metre high and over four metres wide, more of a flattened slit in the rockface than anything resembling a conventional mineshaft. A large slab, cleaved from the scarp itself, partially blocks the way in. Beyond it, the accessible passage runs for roughly 3.9 metres before waterlogged, peaty material brings any further progress to a halt. The working was driven at an angle of 257 degrees into the hillside, suggesting the prehistoric miners were following a specific vein or geological feature rather than simply cutting inward at random.

What makes this particular working notable is the absence of spoil outside the entrance. The broken and extracted rock was almost certainly carried downslope to spoil dumps associated with the broader Mountgabriel mine complex, of which this is one component among several. The site was documented by archaeologist William O'Brien in 1987, and the Mountgabriel mines as a whole are understood to belong to the Bronze Age, a period, roughly 2400 to 700 BC, when copper extraction was taking place at a number of locations along the west Cork coastline. The ore-bearing rock was worked using stone mauls, rounded cobbles that have been recovered from sites in the region, and the copper was likely smelted nearby before being alloyed into bronze. The footwall of this particular working remains buried and unexposed, meaning the full extent and character of the original vein has not been examined.