This is a shell midden, a type of ancient refuse heap composed almost entirely of the discarded shells of seafood, and it is one of three clustered together within a span of roughly thirteen metres along this stretch of coast. Individually modest, the largest of them measures just under two metres in length and barely a tenth of a metre thick at its deepest exposed point, yet taken together they suggest repeated, habitual use of this particular spot by people who knew how to read a shoreline.

The middens sit around thirteen and a half metres west of Doonmore castle, and their proximity to that structure is part of what makes the site intriguing to read. When the middens first came to formal attention in 2008, during work carried out ahead of proposed development at Doonbeg pier, researchers Coyne, Darmody and O'Mahony noted earthen banks in the adjacent field and suggested these might represent a bawn, the walled or embanked enclosure that typically surrounded an Irish tower house or castle for the protection of livestock and as a defensive perimeter. An earlier observation by Casey in 1999 had interpreted those same banks as a possible promontory fort, an older form of enclosure that used a headland's natural geography as part of its defences. Whether the banks relate to the castle, to something earlier, or to both in sequence, remains unresolved. The middens themselves were thought to have been exposed by severe storms, with further reports compiled in 2014 and 2015 reflecting the damage that winter weather on the Clare coast can do to sites that had been quietly sealed beneath the soil for centuries.