It was rectangular, which is an unusual shape for a natural cave, and it was large enough, at roughly 26 metres east to west and 12 metres north to south, to suggest a substantial structure of some kind. Whether it was a cave in any geological sense, a built cell, a ruin repurposed by local memory into something more romantic, or simply a curiosity that attracted a convenient name, nobody now knows.

The place first appears on the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, where it is marked and named as though it were a recognisable and established feature of the landscape. By 1899, when the more detailed OS 1:2500 survey was carried out, the cartographers noted it only as a site, the structure having evidently disappeared in the intervening sixty years. That shift from named place to parenthetical absence is a quiet kind of erasure. Satellite imagery from the early 2010s shows a reclaimed agricultural field, level and unremarkable, with nothing visible at the location the older maps recorded.