The geology of the Roker seafront predates the human stories by more than 200 million years. The Permian magnesian limestone here formed when this part of the world lay near the equator under a warm shallow sea, and as the rock weathered out it produced the famous Roker cannonball nodules: dense spherical concretions that erode free from the softer surrounding stone and lie scattered along the foreshore like a fossilised arsenal. Spottee's Cave is cut into the same limestone, in a small ravine on the seafront between Sunderland to the south and Whitburn to the north. The cave is more shelter than cavern, a few yards deep, just enough to keep weather off a man with nowhere else to go.

The cave's namesake was a stranded sailor whose ship cast him ashore in circumstances no one bothered to record properly. Because he could not converse with the local people, some considered him a poor lunatic, and that is how Sir Cuthbert Sharp referred to him in The Bishoprick Garland, a collection of County Durham folklore and songs published in 1834. He earned his nickname from the spotted shirt he wore. The lyrics of the song about him appear in Sharp's book, preserving the bare bones of the story in the verse forms of early Victorian antiquarian collecting. The treatment was kinder than it might have been. A man washed up speaking an unknown language, given shelter on the seafront, fed by the curious and the charitable, eventually fading from living memory into folk song.

Two centuries after Spottee's lifetime, his name had become a children's bogeyman. Parents in Sunderland and Whitburn used him as the local boggle bo, the figure summoned to frighten children into behaving. There was supposedly a small figure visible in the cave entrance, said to be Spottee himself turned to stone by a witch he had argued with. Local lore is precise about the geography: not the cave most often photographed, which is actually the entrance to one of the tunnels running up to Hylton Castle, but a different cave about 10 yards further into Roker Park, 15 feet up the ravine on the left-hand side. The stone figure was visible into the late 1970s before rubble covered it. Whether the figure was a coincidence of weathered limestone or a deliberate sculpture, no one now remembers.

The cave has been closed to the public for many years on safety grounds, but inspections suggest the dangers were overstated. A by-invitation-only charity event was held inside in January 2012, and there has been local discussion of reopening the cave permanently, perhaps as an outdoor classroom for visiting schools or for special events. The wider seafront, with its rich history of geology and folklore, was declared a Conservation Area in 1995 in recognition of its architectural and historic interest. The story preserved in Sharp's Bishoprick Garland endures. A recording of the Spottee song is now available on YouTube, the eighteenth-century shipwreck of an unknown sailor echoing into the streaming age.