Here, amongst the seaweed and barnacles, archaeologists have discovered worked flints dating to the Earlier Mesolithic period, roughly 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. These ancient tools, including flakes, blades and cores, appear only at low tide in the intertidal zone, with similar finds scattered along adjacent coves within a 200-metre stretch of shoreline.

The origin of these prehistoric artefacts presents an intriguing mystery. They may have tumbled down from a long-lost settlement or midden site that once stood on the cliffs above the beach. More tantalisingly, they could be washing out from a drowned landscape that lies beneath the waters of Lough Foyle. Remnants of a submerged peat layer discovered on the seabed here date to approximately 9,400 to 8,700 years ago, precisely contemporary with the Earlier Mesolithic period. This suggests that what is now the lough floor was once dry land, perhaps an estuarine landscape where Ireland's hunter-gatherers made their camps.

Rising sea levels following the last Ice Age gradually inundated this ancient world, preserving it beneath the waves whilst occasionally releasing fragments of worked stone onto the modern beach. Each low tide potentially exposes tools last touched by human hands millennia ago, when the coastline looked entirely different and Lough Foyle was a river valley rather than a sea inlet. The site continues to yield discoveries; as recently as 2019, another concentration of flints was found nearby, suggesting that much more of this submerged prehistoric landscape remains to be uncovered.