The chamber below measures roughly three metres by three and a half, and for most of its existence it kept its secrets well. It was only in June 2011, when cavers digging to extend a known passage broke through the floor of the chamber, that the place revealed how much had accumulated within it. Among the loose material they disturbed were fragments of Bronze Age pottery, animal bones, oyster shells, and pieces of a human skull. Work stopped immediately, and a two-week rescue excavation followed that August, bringing together archaeologists and cavers to recover what had been disturbed and assess what the cave had once been used for.

The finds spanned an extraordinary range of time. An antler hammerhead, a tool sometimes called a macehead, was radiocarbon dated to between 2139 and 1895 cal BC, placing it firmly in the Early Bronze Age. A broken flint flake recovered from lower levels may be even older, of Neolithic or Mesolithic origin. Scattered across the cave were 345 sherds of undecorated pottery representing at least six separate vessels, all dating to the middle or late Bronze Age. The animal bone assemblage was remarkable for its sheer quantity: 3,124 fragments in total, including the skull of one animal broken into 353 pieces. Species identified included sheep or goat, bird, hare, mouse, cattle, frog, rat, fish, pig, deer, and cat. Most appear to have entered the cave through natural processes, though four mammal ribs bore butchery marks suggesting at least some human food preparation took place there. The most affecting discovery came from a small artificial niche cut into the north wall, measuring just sixty centimetres square and less than a metre high. Inside lay the skeleton of an adolescent, aged between fourteen and sixteen at death. The bones showed no sign of violence, but the body had not been laid out in any recognised burial position, and the skull had come to rest 2.5 metres away in the main chamber. Osteoarchaeological analysis suggested the individual had experienced prolonged hunger and malnutrition during their short life. Radiocarbon dating placed the death most probably in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, a period of considerable hardship across much of Ireland. How the young person came to be in this remote mountain cave, and why they were placed rather than buried in the conventional sense, remains unanswered.