The storms of 2013 and 2014 stripped back sand from the beach at Ballaghaline and exposed something unexpected in the clay layer beneath: shale flakes and axe roughouts sitting at high tide level, the remnants of a prehistoric workshop that had been sealed underground for an unknown number of millennia. A roughout is an axe blank, a piece of stone that has been partially shaped by knapping, the controlled striking of one stone against another to chip away flakes and form a tool. That these objects survived at all, let alone in such quantity, is largely down to the accident of storm erosion.

Following a monitoring and survey programme, excavations took place in 2015 under licence, opening three trenches and one test trench across the site. The results were striking in their variation. The first trench produced a large volume of shale flakes alongside four concentrated deposits of lithic material, each one the byproduct of knapping axe roughouts on the spot. The second trench showed more dispersed material, though roughouts appeared there too, and the presence of large blades struck from cobbles points to the production of other tool types beyond axes. The third trench stood out for its concentration of hammer stones, the rounded rocks used to deliver the blows that shape a roughout, found together with roughouts and loose flakes in a way that suggests an area of sustained, repeated activity. Charcoal, bone, and shell samples recovered during the excavation are expected to allow radiocarbon dating that will eventually fix these activities in time. The excavator's assessment is that axe and tool manufacture was not confined to these trenches but is likely spread over a considerably larger area of the site, much of it still buried.