It is modest in scale, barely large enough to stand upright in places, yet it carries the kind of association that has a way of outlasting far grander structures: a traditional link to St Kevin, the sixth-century monk whose name is woven through the landscape of Wicklow with unusual persistence.

St Kevin, founder of the monastic settlement at Glendalough a few kilometres to the south, is one of those figures around whom legend accumulated thickly and early. Stories of his retreats into caves and rocky hollows form a consistent thread in his hagiography, and caves bearing his name or memory are scattered across the Wicklow uplands. Whether the Dragoonhill cave sheltered him, or simply gathered his name over centuries of local tradition, is the kind of question that cannot now be answered. What is clear is that the association was taken seriously enough to be recorded, and that the cave itself, set into a steep cliff above a valley running north to south, occupies the sort of terrain that early Irish ascetics actively sought out: remote, difficult, and stripped of distraction.