Whether it qualifies as a souterrain, the term given to the stone-lined underground passages built in early medieval Ireland, typically as places of refuge or storage attached to a settlement, is something nobody has been able to confirm. When investigators went looking in 2004, they found nothing. The cave, for now at least, remains a rumour in the landscape.

The tradition associates this underground feature with the nearby rath at Carrowdough, a type of circular earthwork enclosure that served as a farmstead during the early medieval period. Raths across Ireland frequently have souterrains attached to them, narrow corbelled tunnels entered through a hatch in the ground, and it is not unusual for the memory of such structures to persist in local speech long after the physical entrance has collapsed, silted over, or simply been forgotten. That the feature at Carrowbunnaun has a name in community memory, a cave, without anyone being able to point to its precise location, places it in a category of sites that are more folklore than archaeology, at least for the moment.