Locals call it the Shelly Valley, and the name is apt: the sandy floor and the marram-covered slopes around it are scattered with the remnants of ancient meals, middens, the archaeological term for refuse heaps composed largely of shellfish remains, that appear and vanish as the dunes shift with each new season of storms. The site extends across roughly 400 metres, and what surfaces one year may be buried again the next, leaving behind only thin skims of crushed shell on the sand.

The middens contain periwinkle, oyster, cockle, limpet, and mussel shells, often mixed with fire-cracked stones and charcoal-rich patches that mark the positions of hearths. When four of those hearths were excavated in 1981, the finds included bones of cow, pig, sheep or goat, hare, bird and fish, along with a flint arrowhead and two iron nails. A geoarchaeological project carried out in 2015 sampled one of the more substantial middens and submitted a pony hoof bone and charred plant material for radiocarbon dating; the results placed that particular deposit somewhere between the mid-15th and 18th centuries. The combination of shell species tells its own story about how people were working the landscape: periwinkles and limpets were most likely gathered from the exposed, rocky ocean-facing shore to the north and west, while cockles came from the sheltered tidal flats of Culleenamore to the south. Notably absent are fish bones, which researchers have suggested may reflect limited or only occasional access to boats and fishing equipment during that period. The flint arrowhead, however, hints that the valley was in use long before the post-medieval centuries, and the middens here may span anything from prehistory to relatively recent times.

The dunes themselves are the main thing to understand before visiting. Because wind erosion is constant, what is visible at any given time is unpredictable: a deposit that was clearly exposed after a winter storm may be entirely re-covered by summer. The valley floor can reveal fresh scatters of shell fragments after periods of strong onshore winds, and in March 2019 a small surface scatter of fragmented bone was exposed and later collected for analysis precisely because the shifting sand had left it vulnerable to further disturbance. The archaeology here is not static; it is being continuously remade by the same coastal processes that created the valley in the first place.