The site, catalogued as Carrigadirty Rock 5, sits in the intertidal zone, which means it is submerged for part of every day and exposed for the rest, a rhythm that has both preserved and slowly scattered whatever was once here. It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey historic mapping, and in that sense it has no official presence on the landscape at all.

The finds were recorded in September 1998 and catalogued by archaeologist Aidan O'Sullivan, who described them as a possible Neolithic wetland occupation site. Neolithic, here, means the later Stone Age, a period when farming communities across Ireland were beginning to clear woodland, keep livestock, and make pottery. The objects were emerging from organic-rich, reedy clays across an area roughly 30 metres east to west and just 2 metres north to south; a thin smear of ancient material on the foreshore rather than anything architecturally substantial. Radiocarbon dating placed the human skull at approximately 3,634 to 3,370 cal. BC, while two independent dates for the basketry fragments converged on 3,702 to 3,386 cal. BC. Those dates suggest people were moving through or living at the water's edge here during the earlier part of the Neolithic, at a time when the estuary would have looked and behaved quite differently to today. A togher, the Irish term for a wooden trackway laid across wet or boggy ground, has been recorded roughly 32 metres to the east-southeast, hinting at a broader pattern of activity along this stretch of shoreline.

The site lies approximately 75 metres north of a flood relief embankment, and access to the foreshore itself is subject to tidal conditions. There is nothing marked or fenced; the finds are not on display anywhere nearby, and the clays from which they emerged look, to an untrained eye, much like any other tidal mudflat. The best conditions for visiting the lower foreshore would be around low tide, and late summer or early autumn tends to offer calmer estuary conditions. What draws attention here is less any visible feature and more the knowledge of what the mud contains, or once contained, and the quiet strangeness of a Neolithic basket surfacing, piece by piece, from beneath the Shannon.