The name appears to have stuck because of a single visible detail: a narrow opening beneath a stone lintel, just wide enough to suggest the entrance to a souterrain, the kind of underground passage or storage chamber that early medieval communities sometimes built beneath their settlements. In reality, the structure beneath is far more modest, a drystone chamber barely 1.7 metres long and 0.8 metres wide, running east to west, and now filled with clay almost to roof level. Whatever space once existed inside has largely been reclaimed by the ground itself.

The mound that contains this chamber sits in low-lying land prone to flooding, which has done nothing to help its condition over the centuries. It is a roughly circular earthen and stone mound, about 7.5 metres across and just a metre high, revetted in places by kerbstones, six along the north-east arc and one to the west, the kind of structural edging intended to hold a mound's shape against slippage and erosion. The eastern side is now overgrown with briars and thorn bushes, and a displaced roof stone lies on the ground to the west, having long since parted from the chamber it once covered. McCaffrey, writing in 1952, recorded the site in a catalogue of similar features in the region, but even then its condition was poor. The "cave" of the place-name was likely never a cave at all, just a tantalising gap of darkness beneath a lintel that caught the attention of whoever was drawing the maps.