This particular working is one of 31 prehistoric copper mines that together make up the Mount Gabriel mining complex, a Bronze Age industrial landscape without many parallels in Ireland or beyond. The entrance measures 4.6 metres wide and just 1.4 metres high, which gives some sense of the conditions under which the original miners worked, crouching into the hillside to extract ore using stone mauls, the rounded hammer-stones that were the primary tool of Bronze Age mining.

When archaeologist William O'Brien examined the site in 1984, the interior had become waterlogged and was filled with what appeared to be a peat deposit, so no excavation took place. The accessible length at that point was only around 4 metres, but a large semi-circular spoil dump outside the entrance tells a different story about the original scale of operations. That dump spreads roughly 21 metres north to south and 12 metres east to west, covering approximately 330 square metres to an unknown depth. Where erosion had worn away the southern edge of this mound, fragments of stone mauls were visible at the surface, the discarded tools of people working sometime in the Bronze Age, left in place for perhaps three and a half thousand years. The mine sits just south of the Skeagh and Mount Gabriel townland boundary, about 50 metres below two other mine workings on the same scarp face, part of a cluster that implies sustained, organised extraction across the mountain.

O'Brien's 1994 monograph, 'Mount Gabriel, Bronze Age Mining in Ireland', remains the principal study of the complex, cataloguing this working as mine 20 within the wider group. The site is a National Monument in State Care, and the spoil dump with its scattered maul fragments is visible without entering the infilled passage itself.