At some point before the twentieth century, a human burial was lost to coastal erosion, all except for a single skull that clung on long enough to be found.

In 1934, the archaeologist Seán P. Ó Ríordáin recorded the discovery of the skull on the eroding cliff-face. The position in which it lay suggested that the body had originally been interred in a crouched posture, oriented east to west on its side, a burial arrangement associated with prehistoric practice in Ireland. No grave-cut or formal construction of any kind was identified around it, which points away from later Christian burial conventions. What made the find particularly suggestive was what came out of the soil directly above the skull: fragments of burnt clay, and a dog whelk shell that had been broken in the specific way prehistoric communities broke such shells to extract the purple dye they contain. Dog whelks were used as a dye source across Atlantic Europe from the Mesolithic onwards, and their broken remains are a characteristic feature of coastal kitchen-middens, the accumulated rubbish heaps of shellfish, bone, and ash left behind by early inhabitants living off the shoreline. Ó Ríordáin concluded that the skull was of an early type and that the individual may have been one such kitchen-midden dweller, buried at the edge of the settlement they had lived beside.

The burial itself is long gone now, carried away by the same erosion that almost claimed the skull before it could be recorded. What remains is the finding: a single piece of bone, and the company it kept in the soil, dog whelk and burnt clay, hinting at a life lived close to the water's edge at Ringabella, at a date that can only be estimated.