The mine was named for silver, but it produced considerably more lead. That gap between promise and reality runs through the entire history of the place.

The earliest documented working dates to 1551 to 1553, though the ore was probably being extracted before then. The Crown brought in Dutch miners under their captain, Joachim Gundelfinger, running two shifts of fourteen men each day. The operation quickly became mired in disagreement between Gundelfinger and the King's Surveyor, Robert Recorde, over a smelter that was needed to process the ore but never properly established. A plan to bridge the Owenduff or Corock river and connect the mines to the medieval port town of Clonmines, about 850 metres to the northwest, was drawn up but came to nothing. Mining may have resumed in the 1560s under a concession held by one Walter Peppard, though the detail is thin. By 1684, Robert Leigh was describing five or six large pits that had been abandoned after flooding made them unworkable. The site was revived twice more: between 1804 and 1812 under George Ogle, and again from 1845 to 1850 under the Barrystown Mining Company, managed by a Mr. Angove. It was this last company that built the engine house and its chimney stack, which still stands at the northwest angle of the structure.

Four mine-shafts were recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, sitting at the foot of a west-facing slope near the inner end of Bannow Bay. The shafts have since been backfilled, but some of their hollows remain faintly visible in the ground. The chimney, with a base diameter of roughly 2.85 metres, is the clearest marker of what was once a determined, if repeatedly disappointed, attempt to make this stretch of the Wexford coast yield something worth extracting.