Known in 1944 by the Irish name Faill an Aifrinn, meaning the Cliff of the Mass, the site carries that name nowhere on the first-edition Ordnance Survey map nor in the Namebooks of 1841, which gives it an oddly spectral quality: a place that existed in living memory and in local speech but not in official cartography. Today, no one is entirely certain whether the cave survives at all. Limestone quarrying in the 1940s removed the roof and possibly the walls, and the site may have been entirely consumed. It may also be one of three caves still known in the townland. The uncertainty is genuine and unresolved.

The cave carried its mass-going name for a reason. Local tradition holds that during the Penal Laws, the period from the late seventeenth century onward when Catholic worship was suppressed under legislation imposed by the British Crown, the cave served as a place of clandestine religious assembly. Two large boulders inside were said to function as an altar, and steps leading to the entrance were associated with that same period of use. Then, in 1944, quarry workers broke into something older still. Buried under roughly two feet of earth and stones, resting on a flat rock, was a hoard dating to around 650 BC. It comprised a bronze socketed axehead, a bronze socketed spearhead, and three penannular bracelets, that is, bracelets formed as open rings rather than closed hoops. Two of the bracelets are plain, but the third is a Hallstatt C type, a style associated with central European metalworking of the early Iron Age. Scholars including George Eogan and Barry Raftery identified it as an import from eastern France, possibly from the Alsace region, where comparable pieces were particularly common. That a bronze object made in what is now Alsace around 650 BC ended up deposited in a Kerry cave is, by any measure, a quietly remarkable fact. The artefacts are held in the National Museum of Ireland.