A shell midden, essentially a refuse heap of discarded shellfish remains left by earlier inhabitants, was discovered here in the southern corner of the field, close beside a low hillock about 200 metres from the water's edge. Middens of this kind are among the more quietly revealing archaeological features in the Irish landscape; they accumulate slowly, over generations of habitation, and the material they preserve, shells, bone, sometimes objects, can offer a detailed picture of diet, trade, and daily life that more monumental sites cannot.

The field name itself, Gort an Bhráthar, meaning the friar's field, hints at an ecclesiastical connection, and this is reinforced by the ruins of what may be an early church on the north-western side of the same hillock, noted by the scholar and folklorist An Seabhac in 1939. Whether the midden and the possible church were in use at the same period is not certain, but their proximity suggests this corner of Brandon Bay saw sustained activity over a long stretch of time. Adding further weight to that impression is a decorated bronze object found somewhere in the vicinity, catalogued by the National Museum of Ireland under the reference 1931:103, though the precise circumstances of its discovery are not recorded in the available sources. A decorated bronze object turning up near a possible ecclesiastical site and a shell deposit is the kind of combination that points to a place that was, at various moments, both used and valued.