This is an explosives magazine, a thick-walled store for the gunpowder used in nineteenth-century mining operations, and its construction reveals a curious attention to detail. The external wall carries decorative round-headed niches, and the interior is lined with three tiers of lintelled wall presses, essentially built-in shelved alcoves, all enclosed beneath a domed roof rising to a height of around four and a half metres. A porch entrance faces east. For a structure designed to hold dangerous materials at the edge of an active mining landscape, it has a quiet, almost considered quality to it.

This magazine formed part of a wider mining complex, and the surrounding ground still holds traces of that industrial past. On lower ground to the north-west stands a chimney stump, also reaching roughly four and a half metres, originally attached to the southern wall of an engine house, the building that would have housed the steam-powered machinery used to pump water from the workings below. A mine shaft lies to the north, and the lower courses of another structure survive to the west, suggesting a cluster of buildings that once operated together. A second associated magazine stands to the east. The complex dates to the nineteenth century, a period when West Cork saw sustained interest in copper and other mineral extraction, and when the rugged peninsulas of the far south-west were worked over with considerable intensity.