Midden, Cruach Na Cara, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Midden, Cruach Na Cara, Co. Galway

Along a scarp face on the Galway coast near Cruach Na Cara, the slow work of erosion has exposed something that most people would walk past without a second glance: a band of ancient refuse.

Roughly sixty metres long and half a metre thick, this layer of discarded shells and bone sits just below the present ground surface, the compressed remnant of countless meals eaten at the edge of the sea.

A midden is, in the simplest terms, a prehistoric rubbish heap, though that description undersells what such deposits mean to archaeologists. The material here is composed mainly of limpet and periwinkle shells, with some animal bone mixed in, and the accumulation points to sustained human activity at this location over a significant period of time. The site lies close to the shoreline, roughly eighty metres south-east of an early oratory, which suggests the people who left this deposit were part of a community with both a domestic and a religious life rooted in this spot. Limestone flakes are also visible within the eroding scarp face, and several granite boulders protruding from the same section may represent the collapsed or buried remains of a structure, though their precise nature has not been determined.

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