This is a midden, the accumulated kitchen waste of people who ate shellfish here centuries ago, and it survives only as a metre-long exposed strip, much of the cliff face being swallowed by vegetation. Below it, at low tide, a wide expanse of sand flats opens out across the bay.

A sample taken from the deposit in 2009 was submitted for radiocarbon analysis, and the result placed the midden firmly in the Early Medieval period, roughly the sixth to tenth centuries, when the coastlines of Ireland were being worked intensively for seafood by communities who left little else behind in the ground. The shells themselves are unremarkable individually; it is their concentration that carries meaning, marking a place of repeated return and habitual use across what may have been many generations. Above the midden on the same headland sits a bastioned fort, a defensive structure with projecting angular bastions designed to cover the walls with flanking fire, a form that belongs to a much later, post-medieval tradition of military architecture. The two monuments occupy the same narrow promontory but belong to entirely different worlds.

The midden is only accessible and visible from the shoreline at low tide, when the sand flats are exposed. The exposed shell layer sits at roughly a metre above the shoreline, partly obscured by growth along the cliff face, so it requires some patience to locate.