When archaeologists arrived to excavate those graves, they found something older still waiting underneath them, a midden, the accumulated debris of everyday life from a settlement that had long since disappeared beneath the soil.

A midden is essentially a rubbish deposit, the kind of layered refuse that builds up wherever people live, eat, and cook over long periods. The one at Callow proved to be a fairly dense occupation layer, containing burnt areas, post-holes, and pits. Several of those pits appeared to hold the remnants of meals: shells, fish bones, bird bones, and the bones of other animals. Post-holes, the soil impressions left by upright timbers, suggest structures of some kind once stood here, though the precise nature of the settlement remains unclear from what was uncovered. The burials above the midden indicate that the site saw use across more than one period, with the dead eventually interred into ground that had previously served the living. This information came to light through the National Museum of Ireland in February 2016, following the excavation work prompted by the storm damage.