The shelter is barely wide enough for a person to stretch out in, measuring roughly 1.4 metres across, 1.7 metres high, and perhaps 3.5 metres deep. That it was mapped, named, and has retained its identity across nearly two centuries of cartography says something about how seriously local memory has held onto what happened here, or what was believed to have happened.

The cave forms part of an early medieval hermitage associated with St Colman Mac Duagh, the seventh-century founder of the monastery at Kilmacduagh in County Galway. Tradition holds that the saint spent seven years in this cave, praying and fasting in the manner of the desert fathers whose influence shaped early Irish monasticism. The nearby church site, roughly 15 metres to the north-east, bears his name as well, and close to it stands a bullaun stone, a large natural rock with a basin-like hollow worn or carved into its surface, a feature commonly found at early Christian sites and thought to have served ritual or practical purposes. Together, the cave, the church, and the bullaun stone form a small cluster of monuments that point to a sustained early medieval presence in this quiet corner of the Burren.