This is a midden, an ancient refuse heap, the kind left behind when people ate shellfish and discarded the remains in the same spot over and over across generations. What makes this one quietly compelling is not its size but its persistence, and the fact that it does not stand alone.

The deposit sits in pasture, exposed along a section face at the shoreline where erosion has cut through the accumulated layers. The stratigraphy is readable in cross-section: a thin cap of sod, beneath that a layer of humic soil around twenty centimetres deep, and then the midden itself, between fifteen and thirty centimetres thick, set in dark brown soil. Oyster shells make up the bulk of the material, with occasional periwinkle and mussel shells interspersed, and small flecks of charcoal suggesting cooking or fire-keeping nearby. When the site was inspected in 1994, the exposed face ran for roughly twenty-five metres. By 2013 that had reduced to around fifteen metres, traceable intermittently on a roughly west-north-west to east-south-east alignment, suggesting ongoing coastal erosion is both revealing and consuming the deposit at the same time. Two further middens lie close by, one approximately eighty metres to the south-east and another around two hundred metres to the west, which suggests this point of land was a place people returned to repeatedly, over what may have been a considerable span of time.