It is not a dramatic monument. There are no walls, no carved stones, no explanatory plaques. What you are looking at, should you happen to crouch down at the right point near Island Point, is a midden, an ancient rubbish deposit of mussel, periwinkle, cockle, and limpet shells, compressed into a layer roughly four metres long and no more than seventeen centimetres deep, sitting just below the surface of a shoreline bank less than a metre high. The shells are the residue of meals, discarded in the same spot often enough that they accumulated into an archaeological feature in their own right.

This midden is one of seven such deposits exposed along a 3.8-kilometre stretch of Cromane Spit's western side, between Island Point and Black Point, five of them clustered within the townland of Dooaghs. The spit itself is a narrow promontory extending northward into Dingle Bay, the kind of marginal coastal geography that rewarded people who knew how to read tides and gather shellfish. Middens of this kind are found all around the Irish coast and can range enormously in age and scale, from Mesolithic accumulations thousands of years old to deposits left by early medieval communities. The Cromane examples have not been definitively dated in the available record, but their presence in a line along the shoreline suggests repeated, possibly seasonal, use of the same productive stretch of foreshore over a long period.