A shell midden, to use the technical term, is essentially a refuse heap of shellfish remains, bones, and other domestic debris left by people who ate close to the shore. This one was modest, sitting within a shallow pit no more than 0.8 metres wide and 0.12 metres deep, packed with cockle shells in dark, charcoal-rich soil. The shells at the eastern end of the pit were largely unopened, and the base of the pit had reddened from heat. Someone had been cooking here, or processing shellfish close by, long enough ago that the memory of it had entirely vanished until the cliff gave way.

The site was first recorded by Judith Cuppage in her 1986 survey of the Dingle Peninsula, which noted a midden 3.4 metres long exposed in the cliff face beneath sand dunes, with two distinct layers: an upper layer of charcoal mixed with cockle and limpet shells, and a lower layer of burnt stone in sandy soil. Cuppage observed that a ruined lime kiln, a stone-built structure once used to burn limestone or shells to produce agricultural lime, stood nearby, and speculated that the two features might be connected. In 2002, Professor Peter Woodman carried out a more formal investigation, cleaning back the exposed cliff face and recording the section in detail. By that point the cliff in this locality had retreated by two to three metres over the previous twenty years, and a second, separate shell mound had emerged from the eroding face, just over fifty metres west of the one Cuppage had documented. Woodman's work showed that this mound rested within a palaeosol, an ancient buried soil layer, which itself sat on a wave-cut platform buried under up to two metres of sand. A radiocarbon date obtained from one of the shells confirmed an Iron Age date for the deposit. Not long after the excavation, the sea finished what erosion had started. The midden no longer exists.