Across a fourteen-metre stretch of exposed dune, several distinct lenses of midden material appear at different levels in the sand, a midden being the archaeological term for a rubbish deposit, typically one composed largely of food waste left by coastal communities over time. The shells visible here are predominantly cockles, mussels, and periwinkles, the everyday harvest of anyone living close to a productive shoreline, and among them are pieces of burnt stone, suggesting that cooking, perhaps the heating of water by dropping fire-heated stones into it, took place nearby.

What makes the site quietly significant is what lies beneath the shell-bearing sand. Below the deposit, the ground shifts to a layer of dark peaty material, which points to an earlier, wetter landscape existing before the dunes accumulated. The midden lenses at different heights in the sand suggest that people returned to, or continued to occupy, this stretch of coast across an extended period rather than in a single episode, each layer representing a separate phase of activity. The site was documented by G. Diggin and brought to wider attention through A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of South Kerry, published by Cork University Press in 1996, one of the more thorough regional surveys carried out on the Irish Atlantic seaboard.