The caves are visible from a considerable distance across south Sligo, east Mayo, and Roscommon, and they look back out over that same landscape in return. Labelled alphabetically from north to south, A through P, five of them have yielded archaeological material spanning an extraordinary range of human and animal presence, from Late Glacial fauna to medieval metalwork.

The first formal excavations took place in 1901, carried out by a team including Robert Scharff, George Coffey, and others, with further work in 1929 and 1930. Two caves were named in honour of participants: Cave J became Coffey Cave, and Cave P, Plunkett Cave, after Thomas Plunkett. What emerged from these investigations was a layered record of occupation and activity across many centuries. Coffey Cave, a short tapering passage only 5.5 metres long and narrowing to 0.3 metres at its rear, produced an armour-piercing projectile head of medieval date, a whetstone, a bone comb fragment, two bone needles, and pin fragments, alongside a human tooth radiocarbon dated to the Iron Age. Plunkett Cave is altogether larger, its main passage running 15.2 metres before branching into a Sloping Chamber and a Water-Gallery. Its finds included a polished stone axe, an iron bow-saw, two bronze ringed pins, and human teeth, one dated to the early medieval period. Bones of brown bear, red deer, wolf, and hare, all of Late Glacial date, were also recovered there, placing animal activity in the caves at the very end of the last ice age. Cave N added Arctic lemming bones to the picture, species long absent from Ireland. One of the more unsettling footnotes concerns informal discoveries: in 1971 and 1972, separate groups of visitors found human remains in the caves, some removed, some apparently never forwarded to the National Museum of Ireland as intended. Plunkett Cave carries a further layer of mythology. On the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, it is marked as "Owey Cormac Mac Art", a reference to the legendary High King Cormac Mac Airt. A local tradition recorded in 1836 held that Cormac, as a newborn, was carried off by a wolf to a cave at Kesh while his mother slept nearby at a well called Tober Cormac; he was returned to her years later. The detail of a wolf as abductor sits oddly alongside the wolf bones excavated from the same cave, a coincidence that is difficult to set entirely aside.