The entrance is barely a metre and a half high and narrows considerably as it pushes back into the scarp, yet it represents one of thirty-one known prehistoric copper mines that together make up the Mount Gabriel mining complex, one of the most significant Bronze Age industrial sites in Ireland. When archaeologists examined this particular working in 1984, they found the interior waterlogged and partially filled with a peat deposit between thirty centimetres and a metre deep, the slow accumulation of centuries sealing in whatever the miners had left behind.

The mine is recorded as number 26 in the complex, studied in detail by William O'Brien, whose 1994 monograph on Bronze Age mining at Mount Gabriel drew together fieldwork and excavation across the site. The working itself is inclined, driven into the scarp at a bearing of 328 degrees, and extends to an accessible length of roughly three metres. Outside the entrance, a narrow path of broken slabs and spoil leads up to the western side of the opening, a feature also observed at a neighbouring mine nearby. Several metres below the entrance, a small spoil dump sits on level ground, and two rock slabs found to the west of it carry a continuous groove, a centimetre wide and twelve centimetres long, cut by a metal blade at a date that remains unknown. More telling, perhaps, are the stone maul fragments recovered from the dump and the entrance area. Stone mauls, rounded boulders used as hammers to break ore-bearing rock, are the characteristic tool of Bronze Age mining, and O'Brien suggested these examples may have been sourced from a small stream running to the south-east below the mine.

The site sits roughly sixty to seventy metres east of the Skeagh barytes mine, an early twentieth-century working that exploited the same general area for a very different mineral. The proximity is a reminder that Mount Gabriel drew extractive industry across several millennia, though the Bronze Age complex predates its industrial-era neighbour by roughly three thousand years.