In September 1922, government forces swept through the area and seized the anti-Treaty IRA's headquarters at Rahelly House. The men who escaped fled into the mountains and reached this cave, where they remained concealed for six weeks. The location helped: set into a limestone scarp on the southern slopes of Tormore Mountain, overlooking a small valley, it is remote and naturally difficult to spot. Someone had made it more so by manoeuvring a large boulder into position across the natural opening to disguise it further.

The extent to which the fugitives had prepared, or adapted, the cave only became clear in 2022, when Dr Marion Dowd of IT Sligo directed a six-day research excavation under licence 22E0030. The near-entrance section of the eighteen-metre passage, the only stretch with a level floor, showed considerable modification. Stone steps, neatly constructed, led down from the entrance; a U-shaped kerb of stones had been mortared against the cave walls and across the point where the floor drops away; within it lay a mortar floor and an area of flagstone paving. Recovered artefacts included fragments of glazed earthenware dishes, a black glazed-ware jar, a glass bottle, metal vessel fragments, and a clay pipe bowl. Turf sods and turf charcoal tucked into a wall recess suggest the men maintained some form of low fire or lighting. Animal bones point to a diet of rabbit, cod, and chicken during those six weeks in the autumn of 1922.

What the excavation did not expect was to find three earlier phases of use beneath and around the republican material. In the sloping middle section of the cave, bones from at least five sheep and goats, many bearing butchery marks and representing entire carcasses, produced radiocarbon dates ranging from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, probably predating the IRA occupation. Two animal bones reached back much further: a cattle rib with butchery cuts dated to the seventh or eighth century, and a horse bone to the tenth or early eleventh century. Deepest of all, sixteen stone artefacts, mostly chert flakes and cores, hint at prehistoric visits; one piece has been tentatively identified as a Late Mesolithic rough-out, another as likely Neolithic or Bronze Age. A cave that served as a refuge during one of Ireland's most turbulent political moments turns out to have been drawing people in from the surrounding landscape for several thousand years before that.