The find was never formally excavated, and its status remains uncertain, which makes it one of the more quietly intriguing loose ends in Kerry's archaeological record.

Around 1980, the church and graveyard at Kilsarkan were being prepared for mass, a practical clean-up of the kind that happens periodically at working ecclesiastical sites. During that work, something unexpected turned up behind one of the older tombstones, specifically the one lying to the southwest of a pair of closely grouped stones near the interior of the graveyard. What the local people who found it called a "cave" was an opening of some kind, subsequently infilled with old stones and left. By 1987, when the Castleisland District Archaeological Survey documented the account, the feature had already been reburied, and no excavation had taken place. A souterrain, if that is what this is, would be an early medieval underground chamber or tunnel, typically built from dry-stone walling and used for storage or refuge, often associated with nearby settlement activity. Their presence beneath or beside early church sites is not unusual in Ireland, and the ecclesiastical context at Kilsarkan makes the identification plausible, if unconfirmed. The word "possible" in the official classification is doing considerable work here, and honestly, that ambiguity is part of what makes the site worth knowing about.