A midden is, at its simplest, a refuse heap, the accumulated debris of people eating, cooking, and going about their lives over long periods. Shell middens in particular, common along Ireland's western coastline, consist largely of discarded shellfish remains, animal bone, and occasional fragments of pottery or worked stone. What makes them significant is precisely their ordinariness: they are not monuments in any deliberate sense, but rather the unintentional record of daily life, sometimes stretching back thousands of years.