A cave known as Uaimh na mort, Irish for "the cave of the dead", tends to leave an impression before you have even found it. The name alone signals that whatever happened here was not forgotten quickly, and Charles Smith, writing in his 1746 history of County Waterford, gave the name some grounding when he described discovering a human skull inside one of two caves located close together near the River Douglas.

Smith's account, published in Dublin in 1746, is the earliest detailed record of the site. The two caves appear side by side on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, positioned roughly fifty metres from the south-western bank of the River Douglas, which runs on a north-west to south-east axis through the landscape. Running parallel to the river and adjacent to the caves is a mill-race, an artificial channel cut to divert water and power a mill, suggesting that this stretch of ground was actively used and well known to local people for centuries. Whether the skull Smith found pre-dated that industrial activity by generations, or was connected to some more recent misfortune, he does not say. The Irish name, however, implies a collective memory of the place as one associated with death, which points to something older and perhaps more deliberate than accident.