It is barely large enough to contain a person, and at some point in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, it apparently did. The skeleton of an adolescent, aged between fourteen and sixteen at the time of death, was discovered there in 2011 by cavers and subsequently excavated under rescue conditions over a two-week period. What makes the find quietly unsettling is not simply the location but the combination of details that resist easy explanation: the body had not been placed in any recognisable formal burial position, yet there are no marks of violence on the bones. The skull, meanwhile, was found separately, some 2.5 metres away in the cave chamber, and how it became detached from the rest of the skeleton remains unknown.

Radiocarbon dating of a tooth and a foot bone placed the individual most probably within the sixteenth or seventeenth century, though the calibrated date ranges span a broader window, from as early as 1436 through to the late 1660s, with one outlying range extending into the late eighteenth century. Osteoarchaeological analysis, the specialist study of archaeological human remains, indicated that this young person had experienced a physically demanding and nutritionally poor life, with evidence pointing to extended periods of hunger or malnutrition. The Burren landscape around Moneen cave was one of the most contested and disrupted regions in Ireland during the Tudor and Cromwellian periods, and it is difficult not to read something of that turbulence into the bare facts of the skeleton's condition and its unusual resting place. Whether the niche was chosen deliberately as a place of concealment or shelter, or whether the body was placed there after death by others, the circumstances of interment remain opaque.