Midden, Inis Gluaire, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Settlement Sites

Midden, Inis Gluaire, Co. Mayo

On the south-eastern shoreline of Inishglora, a small island off the Mayo coast, the sea is slowly eating away at the land edge, and in doing so it has exposed something that would otherwise remain invisible: a midden, a compressed record of meals eaten and shells discarded over centuries, now visible as a dark band running through the eroding scarp face.

Middens, essentially ancient refuse heaps composed of shellfish remains, animal bones, and domestic debris, are among the most informative archaeological deposits a site can yield. What makes this one quietly remarkable is not any single dramatic find but the sheer layered complexity it hints at, a stretch of roughly fifty metres traced east to west along the exposed section, varying in thickness and density, and almost certainly continuing further beneath the storm beach cobbles that obscure both ends.

The deposit consists mainly of limpet shells in a dark brown sandy soil matrix, with periwinkle shells, crab remains, and animal and fish bones also present. At its most substantial, near the eastern end closest to the island's settlement buildings, the layer reaches approximately 0.4 metres in depth. A possible pit containing charcoal-flecked soil was noted around the mid-point of the midden during an inspection in August 2016, appearing to cut into the layer beneath. Although recorded as a single monument, the midden almost certainly represents multiple, distinct phases of human activity: permanent medieval settlement, habitation during the mid-to-late nineteenth century and again in the 1920s, and periods of temporary use as a fishing outpost in between. Each of those episodes left its own contribution to the accumulation, folded together now into a single eroding seam of shell and bone.

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