The cave at Ballymacmoy sits on the western side of that knoll, a quieter and less examined counterpart to the main Killavullen Caves complex that opens on the eastern face. What draws attention to the Ballymacmoy cave is not its scale but what turned up there: when a team from the Department of Archaeology at University College Cork examined the site in 1997, they found recently disturbed material near the cave opening, among it some human remains. The disturbance itself was unexplained, which left the bones and whatever accompanied them without a clear context.

The broader Killavullen Caves had been the subject of excavation in 1934, and it remains uncertain whether this western cave was included in that earlier work. The 1934 campaign pre-dates modern excavation standards by several decades, and any records from it would need to be read with that in mind. Limestone cave systems like this one are geologically common in north Cork, formed through the slow dissolution of rock by slightly acidic groundwater over very long periods, and they have served human communities in various ways across prehistory and into the historical period, from shelter and storage to burial. The presence of human remains in Irish caves is not unusual in itself, but remains found in disturbed conditions, with no clear indication of when or how the disturbance occurred, present an interpretive problem that the 1997 inspection could not resolve.