It is, in other words, an enormous rubbish dump, and that is precisely what makes it so interesting. Shell middens, the accumulated kitchen waste of communities who relied on shellfish as a food source, are among the most direct records we have of how people ate and lived along Ireland's coastlines. This one, composed of layer upon layer of cockle shells, sits against a backdrop of sandhills that rise over thirty metres high and extend some five kilometres along the northern shore of Dingle Bay.

When researchers Carmody and Wilson visited the site in 1912, they found the midden was not simply a relic. Cockles were still being gathered from the beach beside it each year, boiled on the spot, and the cooked shellfish carried away for eating at home or for sale at market. They also turned up a number of stone tools on the beach nearby, described as 'rubbers' and 'hammers', the kind of implements used for processing food or cracking shells. The continuity is quietly remarkable: a practice ancient enough to have left a deposit three and a half metres deep was still playing out, more or less unchanged, in the early twentieth century. The layers of shell are, in a sense, a compressed record of that repetition, season after season of the same work done at the same place.