The chamber is modest to the point of being cramped, roughly four to four and a half metres long, no more than a metre and a half wide, and barely a metre high throughout. What makes it worth attention is not its size but what turned up when excavators finally opened part of it: human bones and teeth belonging to what appeared to be three separate individuals, burnt bone, charcoal, and a single silver demi-franc struck in 1597.

The cave was one of three investigated in this gorge during excavations carried out in 1938 and 1940, work later published by Gwynn and colleagues in 1942. It is catalogued as Cave III in Martin Dowd's 1997 survey of Irish caves. The chamber had a hole in its roof at the eastern end, through which earth and stones had collapsed over time, and two tunnels, labelled A and B, ran from the chamber southward into the cliff. Only the western end of the chamber and tunnel A were fully opened during the excavations. The silver demi-franc is the detail that catches the imagination most readily: a French coin of the late sixteenth century, turning up in a low limestone cavity in county Cork alongside burnt bone and the remains of at least three people. Whether deposited deliberately or carried in by other means, the coin places human activity in or around the cave at a moment when north Munster was experiencing some of the most violent upheaval of the Tudor reconquest of Ireland, the period of the Nine Years War and its aftermath. The bones have not been dated precisely, and the relationship between the coin and the human remains is not established, but the combination is striking.