Clare Island, which measures roughly fifty metres at its longest and thirty metres across, sits in a narrow channel between Bannow Island to the west and the mainland to the southeast, close enough to both that it feels less like a place in its own right and more like a stepping stone someone forgot to use. What makes it stranger is what lies just beneath the surface.

In 1864, animal bones and oyster shells were observed scattered across much of the island, prompting a trench excavation that same year. The bones turned out to be predominantly deer, alongside cattle and pig, though the only man-made object recovered was a fragment of an earthenware vessel. That near-absence of artefacts makes the deposit harder to read. It could point to a midden, the term for a refuse heap left by early inhabitants who ate and discarded here over time, or it might suggest some other, less obvious use of the island. What has survived into the present is a lens of shells, roughly twenty metres long and about ten centimetres thick, visible within the upper soil layer on the western side of the island. The lens also contains animal bone and burnt stone, that last detail hinting at fire and, possibly, cooking, though nothing more specific can be said with confidence from what has been recorded.