This is a midden, essentially a prehistoric or early historic rubbish deposit, and what erosion has exposed here is a dense band of shells, predominantly limpets, periwinkles, and oyster, running somewhere between half a metre and a full metre deep, with stones and occasional large animal bones mixed through a matrix of dark soil. A thin covering of sod and topsoil, only around twenty centimetres deep, is all that separates it from the surface. The exposed face of the deposit can be traced for roughly twenty to thirty metres east to west, though the full extent of the midden below ground remains unknown.

What makes this site particularly layered, in every sense, is its relationship with the structures immediately to its south. A tower house and its associated bawn stand close by; a bawn being the defensive walled enclosure that typically surrounded a tower house in late medieval Ireland, offering protection for livestock and residents alike. Part of that bawn wall appears to overlie or cut directly into the midden, which places the shell deposit earlier in date than the tower house complex, or at least contemporary with its earliest phases of construction. The midden, in other words, was already there when the walls went up, and whoever built them may have broken through an older accumulation of domestic refuse without much concern for what lay beneath. The observation was made by researchers from the Achill Field School in August 2016, working in the area as the coastline continued its erosion.