The cliff itself stands roughly three and a half to four metres high, dropping vertically to the beach below, and where erosion has cut through its upper edge, a thin horizontal band of shells is exposed in cross-section, sitting just beneath the sod. This kind of deposit is known as a midden, essentially a accumulation of domestic waste, most commonly food remains, discarded by people living nearby. What makes this one quietly arresting is how little it contains, and yet how legible it remains.

The shell layer runs about two and a half metres from north to south and is only ten to fifteen centimetres deep, a meagre scatter of periwinkle and limpet shells pressed into the upper levels of a band of stony soil that sits directly on the bedrock. Toward the southern end of the deposit, two other objects appear: a single animal bone, and the bowl of a clay pipe. The pipe bowl in particular is a familiar type of find in Irish coastal and rural contexts, associating the deposit with the post-medieval period, when clay pipes became common objects of everyday life. Immediately to the west, set back perhaps ten metres from the cliff edge, stands the ruin of a vernacular stone cottage, the kind of small, simply built dwelling that housed much of rural Ireland's coastal population. The midden was almost certainly the household's refuse heap, a place where shells from gathered shellfish and other scraps were tipped over time, accumulating in that thin, unassuming layer now exposed by the eroding cliff.