This is a midden, a refuse deposit left by people who gathered and ate shellfish, and what survives here is a cross-section of meals taken sometime between the late ninth and mid-eleventh centuries. Oyster shells, periwinkles, and cockles are visible in the exposed section, the everyday leavings of a coastal community whose other traces have largely vanished.

The deposit runs roughly 75 feet in length and reaches two and a half feet in depth, figures recorded by Schlichting in 1973. That scale alone suggests repeated, sustained use of the site rather than a single episode of occupation. More intriguing are two levels of flooring, each about five feet long, made from limestone flags laid within the midden itself, implying that whoever used this spot returned to it often enough to organise the space in some minimal way. A radiocarbon date obtained from oyster shell places activity here within a calibrated range of 880 to 1060 AD, a period that in Ireland spans the later Viking Age and the early medieval period, though nothing in the surviving evidence ties the midden directly to any named group or settlement. The date was published by Milner and Woodman in 2007, drawing on laboratory analysis, and it gives the site a precision that its overgrown, unremarkable surface does nothing to advertise.