Midden, Cill Éinne, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
At the western end of An Trá Mór on Inis Mór, a scarp face cut into the shoreline has been slowly giving up the accumulated debris of daily life.
Exposed by erosion, the material here is modest in appearance but quietly informative: broken limestone, sea shells, animal bones, and fragments of a stone wall beginning to emerge from the sand. What makes this stretch of coast notable is not grandeur but accumulation, the slow revelation of a midden.
A midden is essentially a refuse heap, the kind of deposit that builds up wherever people prepare food, discard shells, and dispose of household waste over generations. The material recorded at this site spans the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, based on pot sherds found among the scatter, and there is also slag present, suggesting some kind of metalworking or burning activity in the vicinity. The partly buried stone wall hints at a structure nearby, though how much of it survives beneath the sand is unknown. The site lies within the townland of Cill Éinne, the anglicised form of which, Killeany, refers to the early Christian church associated with St Éinne, one of the most significant early monastic figures in the west of Ireland. That ecclesiastical heritage sits in the background here; this particular deposit seems to speak more to the working lives of islanders in the post-medieval period.
The site was recorded from information supplied by M. Holland rather than from a direct visit, so the precise extent of what the scarp face contains remains somewhat open. Coastal erosion on Inis Mór is an ongoing process, which means the exposed face may look quite different today from how it was described, with more material uncovered or some of it washed away entirely.