Along the southern shore, partially obscured by woodland, lie the remains of copper mines worked during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What makes the spot genuinely unusual is not these relatively recent workings in themselves, but their proximity to something far older: prehistoric copper mines on the same island, among the earliest known in Ireland and arguably in all of north-western Europe.

The later mines, the ones dating to the 1700s and 1800s, were effectively reopening ground that had first been exploited thousands of years earlier, during the Bronze Age. Copper mining at Ross Island is understood by archaeologists to represent some of the oldest metal extraction in the country, with evidence of working stretching back to around 2400 BC. The eighteenth and nineteenth century operations would have been industrial in scale by comparison, using techniques and tools utterly different from their prehistoric predecessors, yet they were sinking shafts and driving levels through ore bodies that ancient miners had already identified and partially extracted. The two phases of activity, separated by millennia, sit within a few hundred metres of one another in the same quiet woodland.