The Dartry Mountains in northwest Ireland have such a mystical air that legend has it fairies and otherworldly spirits haunt their majestic cliffs, caverns, ravines, and lakes. The range’s most iconic geographical feature is the flat-topped Benbulbin, rising like a giant altar 1,700 feet above the Atlantic coastline. Like the rest of the country, this region, which straddles Counties Sligo and Leitrim, is steeped in human history. Hiking trails meander past megalithic structures built millennia ago by ancient Irish ancestors. Yet one detail of this landscape goes unnoticed by even the most sharp-eyed visitors, a spot that blends seamlessly into the environment—as it was intended to. This is Tormore Cave, a site closely associated with one of the darker episodes of the Irish Civil War, which ravaged the island between 1922 and 1923. Until recently, there may have been only a handful of people who knew exactly where Tormore Cave was and what history it held. “A lot of mountaineers who are very familiar with the mountains in Sligo have walked past it hundreds of times and didn’t know it was there,” says archaeologist Marion Dowd of Atlantic Technological University.
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