The entrance is conspicuously narrow, only about 1.8 metres wide and 1.4 metres high, which seems miserly given that the interior opens to a maximum width of 4.6 metres. Fragments of stone mauls, the rounded hammer-stones used to break ore from the rock face, lie scattered across the rubble floor and erode out of the spoil heap outside. The heap itself spreads across roughly 200 square metres in front of the entrance, bordered on its southern edge by a small stream containing large flat slabs.

This working is one of 31 prehistoric copper mines identified across Mount Gabriel, collectively forming one of the most significant Bronze Age mining complexes known in Ireland or Britain. The technique visible on the hanging wall, the smooth concave curve left by fire-setting, involved building fires against the rock face to crack it through thermal stress, then breaking away the weakened stone with mauls. It is slow, labour-intensive work, but effective in the absence of metal tools. The site was first formally recorded by Duffy in 1929 and later by Jackson in 1968, but it was archaeologist William O'Brien who examined it in detail during the 1980s and 1990s, documenting the interior over an accessible length of about 9 metres before flooding near the backwall made further progress impossible. O'Brien's 1994 monograph on Bronze Age mining at Mount Gabriel remains the principal published account of the complex as a whole.