It is not much to look at in isolation, but what it represents is a direct, physical trace of people sitting down to eat beside the Atlantic, discarding their shells, and leaving a record that has endured in the ground ever since.

This is a midden, a term used in archaeology for a deposit of domestic waste, typically concentrated around food remains. The deposit here is modest in scale, just 0.3 metres deep and up to 0.25 metres wide, but its composition is specific and telling. Winkles dominate the shellfish remains, with some cockles also present, both species gathered easily from intertidal rocks and pools of exactly the kind that ring Aughinish Island. The presence of burnt stone alongside the organic material suggests cooking or fire-use nearby. Middens of this type are found all along the Irish coastline and can range in date from the Mesolithic period onward, often representing repeated seasonal use of a productive shoreline rather than a single event. The site was reported to the National Monuments Service by Michael Gibbons.