Allihies Copper Mine Museum opened on 13 September 2007, ceremonially inaugurated by Mary McAleese, then President of Ireland, after ten years of organising work by the Allihies Mines Co-op. The Co-op had formed to preserve a heritage that risked being forgotten - the mines had closed in 1962, and the engine houses, shafts, and ruined chapels were weathering away on the hillside. The Mining Heritage Trust of Ireland supported the project. The museum took the simple, powerful step of housing itself inside a building made by the very community it commemorates: the chapel built by Cornish miners in 1845. The interior has been carefully adapted to display the tools, photographs, and stories of the mines without destroying the modest dignity of the original space. The exhibition rooms also host changing shows by local and international artists, including the Cork-based painter Charles Tyrrell, the sculptor and ceramicist Cormac Boydell, the abstract artist Tim Goulding, and the visual artists Rachel Parry and Margaret Fischer Dukeman.

The museum sits among the ruins it interprets. Walk five minutes uphill and you reach Mountain Mine, where the man engine house, installed by the noted Cornish engineering firm Michael Loam and Son in 1862, still stands roofless against the sky. The man engine was a mechanical lift: a vertical rod with platforms that oscillated up and down a shaft, allowing miners to step on and off at each cycle and so descend or ascend without exhausting climbs on ladders. Without it, working the deeper Allihies veins - some of which ran below sea level - would have been impossible. The pumping engine houses, also built in Cornish style with thick granite walls and tall stacks, served a different purpose: keeping the workings dry. The Beara hills hold water like a sponge, and stopping the pumps for any length of time meant losing the mine. When the pumps finally fell silent in the 1880s and again in 1962, water reclaimed the lower workings within weeks.

When Allihies' mining became unprofitable in the late nineteenth century, the question for the families was not whether to leave but where to go. Many followed the work to Butte, Montana, where the copper deposits being opened up by the Anaconda Company would soon make it one of the richest mining towns in North America. The Allihies miners brought specialist skills: hard-rock drilling, shaft sinking, pump and engine work, an understanding of how to follow a copper vein through Cornish-style geology. They also brought their families, their parish loyalties, and their language. Butte's neighbourhoods of Corktown, Dublin Gulch and the Cabbage Patch filled with people whose names traced back to Beara - Lowneys, Harringtons, Sullivans, O'Connors. Their descendants still come back to walk the engine house ruins above Allihies village, looking for the names on the gravestones of the chapel where the museum now stands.

The exhibits preserve specifics that would otherwise be lost: the wage scales paid to surface workers and underground hewers, the names of the captains who ran the various pits, the routes the ore travelled - by horse and cart to Ballydonegan Strand, then by sailing ship to the smelters at Swansea in Wales, where 297,000 tons of Allihies ore were recorded passing through between 1812 and 1912. There are mineral specimens including the brilliant blue-green crystals of langite, a hydrous copper sulfate that occurs naturally where the workings have been exposed to air and water. There are photographs of miners in their hats with the candle-clip on the brim, the standard light source underground until carbide lamps replaced them. The museum also acts as a working trust, slowly restoring Man Engine House and other structures, and developing guided tours into the older workings as conditions allow. It is one of those rare museums where the artefact and the place are the same thing.