It appears on the national monuments record under the straightforward designation of a cave, which in an Irish archaeological context can mean anything from a natural limestone solution cavity used for shelter in prehistory to a souterrain, an artificially constructed underground passage built to serve an early medieval settlement as a place of storage or refuge. Which of those this particular feature is, or what it may have yielded by way of finds or association with nearby sites, is not yet publicly documented.

The townland name itself is worth a moment's pause. Kilkenny as a place name in Mayo is unrelated to the better-known county in Leinster; it derives from the Irish Cill Chainnigh, meaning the church of Cainnech, and points to an early ecclesiastical presence in the area. Mayo's landscape is heavily karstic in places, riddled with natural cave systems formed over millennia as slightly acidic groundwater dissolved the underlying limestone, and caves in such regions were frequently used by early inhabitants long before any written record begins. Whether this particular site connects to that broader pattern of use, or represents something more localised and specific, remains a question the available record cannot yet answer.