Shells, heat-shattered stone, and worked flint had spread across a roughly 20-metre-square area by the time anyone noticed, the sea quietly unravelling a deposit that had lain undisturbed for thousands of years. What caught the attention of archaeologists was not just the shells but the stone axes and axe roughouts found among them, objects that suggest people were not merely eating here but making things, shaping tools from raw material at the water's edge.

The site came to light in 2011 during a programme of field walking, and a test excavation followed in August 2012. The radiocarbon dates that came back placed the deposit firmly in the Later Mesolithic, the later phase of the middle stone age in Ireland, a period generally dated to roughly 7000 to 4000 BC, when small, mobile groups lived by hunting, fishing, and foraging. More striking still, the dates placed this midden approximately 900 years earlier than a closely related shell midden sitting around 280 metres to the north-east, also on the Fanore shore. The two sites share a similar character, with periwinkle and limpet as the dominant shellfish and comparable stone tool assemblages, but they are not contemporary. The southern site is the older of the pair, which suggests the coastline here was visited, and revisited, across a very long span of time. Middens of this kind, essentially refuse heaps of shellfish remains and domestic debris, are among the most direct records left by Mesolithic communities, and finding two in close proximity, separated by nearly a millennium of use, is unusual anywhere in Ireland.