Known locally as Robber's Den, it is one of eight caves cut into the same escarpment, a sheer rockface rising thirty metres from the surrounding field system. The entrance commands extensive views, which may or may not have been the point.

The cave was first formally explored in 1935 by an English caving group, but its archaeological significance only became clear in 1963 when members of the Chelsea Speleological Society excavated the site and found both human and animal bones. The cave's layout is a series of descending chambers, each harder to reach than the last. A linear entrance chamber runs roughly five metres from northeast to southwest; a narrow gap leads through to a rectangular second chamber roughly three and a half metres long, lower than the first by about two metres. From there, a crevice barely half a metre wide in the north wall opens into a third chamber, prone to intermittent flooding and largely choked with collapsed roof and wall material, leaving a ceiling height of around one metre. It was here, in 1989, that members of the Cork Speleological Group found a previously unknown entrance to this third chamber, along with human bones and two stone rings on the floor. Archaeologists from University College Cork subsequently excavated the second and third chambers. The disturbed remains of an adult female recovered from the third chamber were dated to the transition between the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age, while bones from a second individual proved to be Medieval in date. Two people, separated by perhaps a thousand years or more, had ended up in the same cramped, flood-prone cavity inside a cliff.

The cave entrance sits four metres up the rock face, which goes some way to explaining both its name and the fact that it was overlooked by formal archaeology for so long. It lies within a large field system, but the approach is genuinely difficult and the entrance is not visible from below in any obvious way. Anyone drawn to the site should be aware that the innermost chamber floods and that the passages connecting the chambers are narrow enough to make progress slow and physically demanding.