A midden, in archaeological terms, is essentially a refuse heap, most often composed of food waste such as shellfish remains, bone, and ash, and over time these deposits can build into records of diet, settlement, and environment that are difficult to recover any other way. This particular deposit runs for roughly twenty metres along the base of a near-vertical field boundary, and at around twenty centimetres thick it represents a concentrated accumulation of material rather than casual littering. The shells are almost entirely cockles, with only occasional razor shells and periwinkles appearing in the mix.

The dominance of cockle shells is not incidental. Cockles thrive on tidal sandflats, and the character of this stretch of the Moy estuary, where the river narrows towards its southern end and small islands sit accessible across exposed sand at low tide, would have provided exactly that kind of habitat. Whoever left this deposit was exploiting a resource that was immediately and reliably available underfoot. A second midden has been identified roughly twenty-five metres to the north, visible in the same earthen scarp, suggesting that this part of the shoreline saw repeated or extended use. Around eighty metres to the south stands Rosserk Abbey, a Franciscan friary founded in the fifteenth century, and while no direct connection between the abbey and the middens has been established, the proximity is at least worth noting when thinking about who may have gathered shellfish along this bank and why.