When excavations were carried out in 2001, ahead of works to provide visitor facilities on the island, archaeologists uncovered clay floors, metalled surfaces, the kind of compacted stone or gravel laid down to create a firm working area, and widespread scorching. Taken together, these point to a substantial settlement active during the early or high medieval period, roughly between the sixth and thirteenth centuries.

What makes the discovery quietly striking is the thread of continuity it suggests. The excavated material, including traces found beneath nineteenth-century cottages, indicates that the earlier buildings may have arranged themselves along a shingle spit just above the shoreline, following the same logic of the landscape that later inhabitants would independently repeat. The cottagers of the 1800s, in other words, placed their homes in much the same spots as people had chosen a thousand years before, drawn by the same practical relationship with the water's edge. It is a reminder that the most ordinary decisions, where to build, where to shelter, where to land a boat, can leave surprisingly legible marks beneath the ground, waiting for a contractor's survey to bring them to light.