Yet this small horizontal opening, driven roughly 55 degrees into a quartz-sulphide vein on the mountain's western face, has been venerated for centuries as a hermitage associated with early Irish saints. The working is modest in scale: 2.2 metres wide at the entrance, narrowing to about 1.2 metres at the back, and only 4.8 metres deep. The walls are streaked with green malachite mineralisation and their smooth, polished, concave profiles suggest the possible use of fire-setting, a technique whereby rock faces were heated and then rapidly cooled to fracture the stone. No spoil dumps survive at the immediate working, though further shafts and degraded dumps along the same quartz vein point to later, more systematic activity in the area.

The site carries layers of history that sit uneasily alongside one another. Known locally as St Crohane's Cell or Carraig Chrócháin, it is dedicated to St Crohane, the patron saint of the parish of Kilcrohane. In the eighteenth century, both the antiquarian Charles Smith and the traveller Richard Pococke noted a tradition linking the cave not only to St Crohane but also to St Kieran of Seir, one of the so-called Twelve Apostles of Ireland, who was said to have composed his monastic rule here. The site formed a station on the turas, a formal pilgrimage circuit, associated with the three-day pattern of Kilcrohane, which began each year at the holy well of Toberavilla on 29 July; that pattern is now defunct. Meanwhile, the industrial record pulls in a different direction: some of the mining trials in the area may connect to the colonial enterprises of Sir William Petty and the Kenmare Colony during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by 1808 the primitive mine had been pressed into service as a forge. A drystone rectangular structure adjacent to the opening may relate to this later mining phase. The same cavity, in other words, has been at various points a possible early medieval retreat, a node on a living pilgrimage route, and a working forge.