Erosion has cut through the deposit and left it exposed in cross-section, which is how archaeologists tend to encounter middens, the ancient equivalent of a kitchen bin, where communities discarded food waste, broken objects, and other domestic debris. What makes this particular exposure quietly arresting is the detail it preserves: a compact lens of shells and dark grey soil, barely two metres long and twenty centimetres deep, sitting just thirty centimetres below the modern sod.

The shells are predominantly limpets, which were a staple coastal food source, gathered easily from rocks at low tide. A few periwinkle and mussel shells are also present. The animal bones tell a fuller story of the diet: cattle and pig are both represented, and among the pig bones are those of a very young piglet, suggesting slaughter at a particular season or the opportunistic use of animals that did not survive. A small number of fish bones round out the picture. What holds the deposit together structurally are small flat stone slabs, mostly horizontal, projecting from the cliff face above and around the shell layer, giving the midden something of a defined edge. Whether these stones were deliberately placed or simply accumulated around the deposit is not entirely clear. Immediately to the south lies a separate enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval walled feature found across early Irish settlement sites, and there is a possibility that part of its wall was built over the midden, though the precise relationship between the two has not been established.