A shell midden, which is essentially a refuse heap left by people who ate shellfish over extended periods, represents one of the quieter categories of archaeological evidence: not a monument, not a structure, but the accumulated leavings of ordinary life, compressed into the earth at the water's edge.

Traces of the midden were noted in 1986, reported through personal communication from T. Robinson, and the site may correspond to one mentioned considerably earlier by Brunicardi in 1914. That two-decade gap between the nineteenth-century reference and the modern observation points to a site that has been noticed, half-forgotten, and noticed again, without ever attracting sustained investigation. Middens of this kind are found at many points along the Irish Atlantic coast and can range in date from the Mesolithic period onward, occasionally yielding animal bone, charcoal, and the remnants of simple tools alongside the shells themselves. Whether the Ballyconneely deposit belongs to prehistory or a more recent period of coastal habitation is not recorded.