The find belongs to the Neolithic period, and what makes it quietly remarkable is not just its age but the circumstances of its survival: a natural fault line in the rock had essentially done the work of a tomb builder, offering a ready-made chamber that people in prehistoric Ireland recognised and used for their dead.

The site was recorded and excavated by Raghnall Ó Floinn of the National Museum of Ireland, first over two weeks in March 1992 and then for a further week in May. The oval chamber measured 4.5 metres in length and 2.5 metres wide, with its long axis running east to west, and it sat on the slope of a low hill at around 200 feet above sea level, commanding extensive views to the north and east. Inside, archaeologists recovered three complete burials, all apparently adult males, along with portions of a fourth. The bodies had been arranged in crouched inhumations, a Neolithic burial practice in which the body is drawn into a foetal position, and placed around the walls at the western end of the chamber. Two of the burials were accompanied by decorated pottery vessels, including a necked bowl of Drimnagh type, a recognised Neolithic ceramic form. One burial yielded a flint discoidal knife at the base of the spine and the head of a bone pin nearby. On a ledge above one of the burials, two decorated bowls had been set out with burnt animal bone and a cow tooth placed between them, and a perforated antler tine was fused to the ledge face. Cremated bone, some of it human, was found at two separate locations within the chamber. A full account of the excavation was later published in Cahill and Sikora's 2011 volume, Breaking Ground, Finding Graves.

The site itself is no longer accessible in any conventional sense, having been exposed during quarrying works, and there is no marked trail or visitor point associated with it. The finds and excavation records are held by the National Museum of Ireland, and the published report in the Cahill and Sikora volume remains the most detailed source for anyone wanting to understand what was recovered. For those interested in Neolithic burial practice in the Irish midlands and the Munster region more broadly, the Annagh cave burial is a useful and specific case study, notable for the care with which the dead were accompanied by objects and the degree to which a natural geological feature was incorporated into a deliberate funerary landscape.