What makes it quietly unsettling is the gap between what was once recorded there and what remains. At some point before the Ordnance Survey Name Books documented it, the cave held a large quantity of human bones. Those bones are now entirely gone, leaving no physical trace of whatever event or practice deposited them. In their place, towards the inner end of the cave, are deposits of barnacles and periwinkles, suggesting the site has a longer and stranger biography than any single explanation can account for.

The place is known locally as Templenafannada, or Teampall na Feannaide, a name with ecclesiastical overtones that sits oddly against its raw, geological character. A church name attached to a cave is not unprecedented in Ireland, where early Christian hermits sometimes used natural shelters as oratories or retreats, but no structural remains have been identified here to confirm that reading. Local oral tradition preserves a separate layer of meaning altogether, describing the cave as a place of refuge. Whether that memory refers to the same episode that produced the human bones, or to something else entirely, is not recorded. The Ordnance Survey Name Books, compiled in the nineteenth century, were among the first systematic attempts to document place names and local knowledge across Ireland, and their note about the bones represents the earliest written reference to the site; whatever the surveyors saw or were told has since become unverifiable.