It leaves no mark on the surface whatsoever. You could walk directly over it and notice nothing.

What lies beneath is a midden, the term archaeologists use for the accumulated food refuse of past communities, most often shellfish remains, animal bone, and ash. Middens are among the oldest readable records of how people ate and lived along coastlines, and they appear all around Ireland wherever prehistoric or early historic populations had reliable access to shellfish beds. The deposit at Curraghbinny Point runs to around 25 metres in length and varies between a quarter and seven-tenths of a metre in thickness, suggesting repeated, sustained use of the site rather than a single episode of occupation. The shells recorded here, oyster, limpet, and cockle, were all species harvested directly from the intertidal zone of Cork Harbour, and their presence in concentrated layers indicates that whoever left them was returning to this spot across a considerable period. The deposit was noted in a 1975 survey of Cork Harbour archaeology, though no date of origin for the midden itself has been published.